A high-speed camera is a device used for recording fast moving objects as a photographic image(s) onto a storage medium. After recording, the images stored on the medium can be played back in slow-motion. Today high speed cameras are entirely electronic using a CMOS active pixel sensor, recording typically over 1000 frames per second into DRAM and playing images back slowly to study the motion for scientific study of transient phenomena.
A normal motion picture is filmed and played back at 24 or 30 FPS. The fastest cameras are generally in use in scientific research, military test and evaluation, and industry. Saving the recorded high speed images can be time consuming because the newest cameras today have resolutions up to four megapixels at record rates over 1000 frames per second, which means in one second you will have over 11 gigabytes of image data. Technologically these cameras are very advanced, yet saving images requires use of slower standard video-computer interfaces.
But the new era of high-speed cameras has just started with OptoMotive´s innovativeness and development of a system based on enormously large FPGAs, GigE Ethernet and the most important part, a JPEG compression core. That way the acquired images are processed inside the camera and the image streaming and storing now goes by the speed of light!
• do motion analysis and slow motion photography,
• understand river erosion,
• unravel the mysteries of the flight of fruit flies,
• golf, baseball, basketball, or football matches analysis,
• body movement analysis,
• freeze the motion of a bullet in flight,
• to send real-time image at full speed to the system PC,
• and to preview anything in slow-motion.