Chip delivers better digital pictures for less power

Imaging chips revolutionized the photography industry, and now the chips themselves are being revolutionized. A pair of newly patented technologies may soon enable power-hungry imaging chips to use just a fraction of the energy used today and capture better images to boot - all the while enabling cameras to shrink to the size of a shirt button and run for years on a single battery. Placed in a home, they could wirelessly provide images to a security company when an alarm is tripped, or even allow mapping software like Google's to zoom in to real-time images at street level. The enormous reduction in power consumption and increase in computing power can also bring cell-phone video calls closer to fruition.The team of Mark Bocko, professor of electrical and computer engineering, and Zeljko Ignjatovic, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, has designed a prototype chip that can digitize an image right at each pixel, and they are working now to incorporate a second technology that will compress the image with far fewer computations than the best current compression techniques.

Source: rochester.eduAdded: 16 June 2006