Thanks to this ability, the HyperCam is able to reflect the blood vessels beneath the skin in a different manner in regular light.
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The low cost camera could revolutionise everything from shopping to medicine, the team behind it says. Infrared cameras, such as HyperCam, illuminate a scene in 17 wavelengths by using both the visible and near-infrared parts of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Hyperspectral imaging uses a broader range of the electromagnetic spectrum than an ordinary camera. Though they haven’t gone into much detail about how exactly it would work as a biometric device (a slightly creepier sounding application of the tech), it would be pretty cool to have a miniature infrared cam attached onto your regular phone. They also developed intelligent software that easily finds “hidden” differences between what the hyperspectral camera captures and what can be seen with the naked eye. Because researchers want to bring a mini infrared camera to your smartphone that would act as a “food safety app”.
It uses visible and invisible near-infrared light to see beneath the surfaces of objects and catch more details than the average camera that relies on visual light alone.
But an affordable camera technology being developed by the University of Washington and Microsoft Research might enable consumers of the future to tell which piece of fruit is perfectly ripe or what food in the fridge is going rotten. But the team behind it estimate it’ll cost as little as £30 when it does become available.
The findings were presented at the UbiComp 2015 conference at Osaka, Japan.
In tests it predicted the ripeness of fruit with 94% accuracy by peering through their skins.
Because the HyperCam can pick up so many wavelengths of light, it’s able to pick up more detail than the average camera, especially when it comes to fingerprints.
“It’s not there yet, but the way this hardware was built you can probably imagine putting it in a mobile phone”, said Shwetak Patel, Washington Research Foundation Endowed Professor of Computer Science & Engineering and Electrical Engineering at the UW.
There are a few limitations to the technology right now, so it might not be as simple as waltzing into the grocery store.
At the moment, the unit itself is too big and it also struggles in brighter light – not ideal when you’re walking down the aisle in Sainsbury’s. The camera revealed vein and skin texture patterns on peoples’ hands, which allowed it to differentiate between the images of hands from 25 people with 99 percent accuracy.
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And it’s not quite small enough to fit in your pocket, so it may be a few time until you can use it on your phone.
