Monday 28 March 2011

Infrared 100 Exhibition photographs online

For those of you who were unable to get to Bath for the Infrared 100 exhibition last October, the RPS have put some of the images online on their web site.

Go to www.rps.org/fenton-house/Infrared-100 and you can browse through some of the historic and contemporary photographs we included. These include a couple of RW Wood's photos from 1910 and 1911, Abe Frajndlich's Rosebud as Demeter, Carol Highsmith's Streetcar on St Charles and Teresa Airey's Magical Banyans. Professor Francis Ring's 1959 thermal image of an arthritic knee, made with a prototype scanner using a searchlight mirror and bicycle chains, and Professor Robert Greenler's 1971 photograph of the infrared component of a rainbow are also included.

A selection of images are also featured in the current RPS Journal.

Thursday 17 March 2011

Thermal Street View from MIT

The aim may be to provide a rapid energy audit of buildings but MIT have a thermal imaging system that is interesting for purely visual reasons.

The full story is in this news piece on their web site, complete with video.

Here's what caught my eye ...
The new process begins by photographing buildings with a system the team developed to get high-resolution, long wave infrared images using an inexpensive, low-resolution camera. Normally, the cost of high-resolution far-infrared cameras is prohibitive for such widespread use — such cameras can cost $40,000 each. As a substitute, the team developed a novel patent-pending technology called “Kinetic Super Resolution” that uses a computer to combine many different images taken with an inexpensive low-resolution IR camera (costing less than $1,000), that produces a high-resolution mosaic image.
Note that in this context 'high resolution' would be 640 by 480 pixels resolution for $40K. In this case the MIT system's Kinetic Super Resolution improves image resolution by using moving (presumably this means scanning) images. I would imagine that this is trading temporal resolution for spatial resolution by looking at how successive pixels differ when these pixels are displaced by less than pixel/image resolution. A patent is pending.

Wednesday 2 March 2011

DNS tidy-up

I have, at last, sorted out the domain name for this blog so it runs properly off www.infrared100.org ... although infrared100.blogspot.com still works. Apologies if you got a seemingly spurious landing page while I sorted out the routing.