21st Century Spies: Insectoid Megacamera

When somebody tells you that they're being spied on by giant flying insect cameras, the standard response is to back away carefully not making any sudden moves.  This should not be changed by the fact that soon, they'll be right.

University of Alabama researchers are developing a giga-camera, a composite optical system with more megapixels than a thousand of your snazzy digital picture-takers.  They've designed the ultimate aerial surveyor based not on the mighty hawk, or the keen-eyed eagle, but the fly.  The system works by combining images from hundreds of smaller cameras into one great-big system.  This requires a lot of processing power to correct for individual aberrations but the result is far greater than the sum of its parts.  A single huge optical system is extremely expensive to build, difficult to transport, and when damaged even a little you might as well throw the whole thing out as garbage. By using an array of smaller elements you can use cheaper, mass-produced components - and if you trash a few, no problem!  Just chuck  them out, pull another couple off the shelf and you're good to go again.

The only element needed to expand this fly-eye-in-the-sky is the correction calculations - but as you may have noticed reading this, we have a lot of computers these days.  And if you don't think a system promising unparalleled surveillance abilities over wide areas will earn the money to buy them, you really haven't been paying attention.  Never mind military applications, Google or facebook alone will pay the bills.  Throw in global positioning system enabled phones and you've got the ultimate "Status message and location" system.

The current test system is flown at a height of 5 kilometers, and can watch three hundred and fifty square kilometers with a resolution of 30 centimeters.  The system is extensible to orbit, however, with fly-faced mega-satellites which could observe huge zones from the safety of space.  Not that this gives the tinfoil-hat brigade any extra credibility.  The thing most conspiracy nuts fail to realise is that while the government does have access to many incredible surveillance systems, they don't tend to use multi-million dollar gear to monitor penniless psychopaths.  Particularly psychos who, in fairness, try to tell everyone in the street everything about themselves.  It's like sending James Bond to gather intelligence on cinema showtimes.

Posted by Luke McKinney.

Insect camera

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Comments

[knoxvilledaniel]

A fly - sized camera / monitoring device wouldn't be out of the question, given the advance of electronic " evolution ", & perhaps such a thing was inevitable. We already have sensitive optics for ground & orbital systems, so applying them to this kind of purpose would be logical. Forget about using them for domestic surveillance or potential enemy troop movements, they could measure pollution levels, ground traffic patterns, possibly air traffic patterns, erosion, thermal output, & a host of other things.