Wherein Mike Warot describes a novel approach to computing which follows George Gilders call to waste transistors.

Thursday, October 28, 2010

Applications - image processing, survey plane

One of the long term issues with having a technology, which should be much more powerful than existing hardware is finding an appropriate use scenario for it.  Today one occurred to me on my commute.

I've been doing a lot of experimenting with synthetic focus imagery. Having recently written a tool to help me do image matching, I've begun to appreciate why Hugin gets so bogged down generating and matching control points. The cross correlation of 2d image sets is a huge resource hog. Fortunately, the bitgrid  should be quite capable of handling it, because the computations are data local, with the only global data being the source material which loads once per frame, and the output maximum coordinates, again once per frame.

I imagine a remote control glider with a pair (latter an array) of cameras feeding into a system which correlates the images to generate altitude data. It should be possible once this 2d triangulation is done, with hints from the navigation system, to then generate a 3d image of the area below, with altitude information at least as accurate as the pixel resolution allows.

If the plane is slow and stable enough to allow multiple overlapping images of the same area, it should be possible to derive super-resolution images using Richardson-Lucy deconvolution.

It all hinges on the question of power consumption of a single bitgrid cell. Something I don't know, but an experienced IC designer should be able to figure out on his lunch break.

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I fix things, I take pictures, I write, and marvel at the joy of life. I'm trying to leave the world in better condition than when I found it.