Dual advance for imaging chips

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, all 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 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 University of Rochester 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 digitise 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.