Canons is releasing a new camera ;
Could we be involved…
Canon's new camera shoots color video in pitch black, from miles away
By
Loz Blain
August 01, 2023
Canon's new MS-500 puts the company's groundbreaking new ultra-sensitive SPAD sensor into a commercial video camera
Canon
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Canon has wrapped its experimental ultra-high sensitivity Single Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) sensor up into a world-first commercial product. The new MS-500 accepts ultra-telephoto broadcast lenses, and can shoot color video on a moonless night.
As the name suggests, these SPAD sensors effectively count individual photons – the tiniest possible quanta of light – noting down the precise moment when they hit the pixel array, as opposed to doing what a regular CMOS camera sensor does, and outputting the total amount of light received over a given amount of time. The "avalanche" part refers to an amplifying effect of sorts; when a pixel detects a photon, it releases an electron, and that electron itself, at high speed and high voltage, can shake other electrons loose as it goes.
SPAD sensors record the arrival of every individual photon, complete with exactly when it arrived – making them very handy 3D time-of-flight sensors
What you end up with is a sensor with an insane level of sensitivity in low light, almost like a high-speed Geiger-counter for photons. You can use that in a number of ways; Canon, for its part, used an
experimental 1-megapixel version of this thing to build a 24,000-fps camera capable of producing usable images at shutter speeds in the tens of trillionths of a second.
How quick is that? Quick enough to freeze light itself in motion. Check out the video below, which shows the movement of a single pulse of laser light, as it moves through smoke, bouncing off mirrors in a three-dimensional setup.
SPAD sensors themselves are not new; they've been used broadly for more than 50 years – most notably, in applications like LiDAR, 3D time-of-flight (ToF) imaging and PET scanning, where their incredible speed gives them the ability to accurately record exactly
when a photon arrived, allowing these devices to create 3D models of the world.
What
is new is that Canon has developed a
groundbreaking 13.2 x 9.9 mm, 3.2-megapixel, ultra-high sensitivity SPAD sensor and built a commercial, interchangeable-lens video camera system around it.
Canon says the new MS-500, announced yesterday, is the world's first camera of its kind, and the highest pixel-count SPAD sensor ever offered for sale, with a resolution higher than 1080p. It debuts a new architecture that Canon claims gives it exceptional performance, even among SPAD sensors, in temporal resolution, low noise and near-infrared light spectrum sensitivity.
It's capable of capturing video in illumination levels as low as 0.001 lux – we're talking starlight in the middle of a moonless night – "as though viewing with the naked eye in well-lit environments" – and it's also capable of processing data in somewhere around 100 trillionths of a second, which Canon says will allow it "to capture objects moving at high speeds including photons."
At an estimated retail price of US$25,200 (plus nearly $100K more for that monster lens), it's certainly not pitched at the consumer level. Indeed, Canon is pitching it for "areas with extremely high-security levels, such as seaports, public infrastructure facilities, and national borders, [where] high-precision monitoring systems are required to surveil targets both day and night accurately."
But the sensor technology itself could prove to be a breakthrough in medical imaging, 3D capture, VR/AR and autonomous cars and robotics. Its capabilities with near-infrared spectrum light, for example, could give it superhuman vision and object detection capabilities in fog, mist and bucketing rain.
Very cool stuff – although Canon has provided exactly zero sample video footage at this stage, which strikes us as an absolute facepalm of a PR blunder. In the meanwhile, there's ... this?
A thumbnail-sized photo of a boat on a lake with lights on is the best sample image Canon has deigned to provide at this stage
Canon
About SPAD
Described is a Single-Photon Avalanche Diode (SPAD) array microchip comprising: a plurality of SPAD sensors; and a triggering circuit configured to detect and read out the triggering order of SPAD sensors over a timing interval wherein the timing interval comprises one or more frames. An event based neuromorphic SPAD array microchip is also described. The chip architecture and triggering methodology takes a local group of SPAD sensors connected in a certain way and by using simple digital circuits emulating how neurons behave, patterns within a local receptive field are identified. Only when these unique patterns or features are identified are "events" triggered for each receptive field in the order they occur, or in an asynchronous manner. Each neuromorphic circuit (or collection of silicon neurons) act over overlapping receptive fields, and are tiled across the entire visual spatial field of the SPAD array to a form a convolution layer.