2016 Press Releases
UCC invents new camera technology
UCC engineers have invented a new camera technology that can work in unison with today’s CCD/CMOS sensors to pull out image features previously unseen.
Nabeel Riza, Chair Professor of Electrical Engineering and Head of School of Engineering at UCC has invented the new technology called CAOS or Coded Access Optical Sensor.
Although optical cameras have been around for centuries, the CCD sensor camera arrived in the 1960s (awarded Nobel Prize in 2009) while the CMOS sensor camera was invented in the 1990s. Both camera technologies dominate the imaging world across various applications from medicine to industrial testing and machine vision to astronomy.
Unlike current CCD/CMOS cameras that face great difficulty in viewing scenes with bright and high contrast objects, the CAOS camera allows capture of the previously invisible scenes by transforming the incident light into mobile phone-type signals that undergo light-detection and extreme dynamic range decoding via electronic wireless technology.
A version of the CAOS camera is reported by Prof. Riza’s team in the online open access International Optical Society (OSA) high Impact journal Optics Express demonstrating a factor of 1000 improvement in camera dynamic range over a commercial CMOS sensor camera. CAOS when combined with today’s sensors has the promise to revolutionize the imaging world.