Scientists design an imaging system capable of obtaining 12 times more information than the human eye

Photo 1: Spectral information from the same image, as seen through a conventional three-colour channel system (left) and through the new system developed at the University of Granada (36 colour channels, right)

This scientific development could be used in the not too distant future to create new assisted vehicle driving systems, to identify counterfeit bills and documents, or to obtain more accurate medical images than those provided by current systems

Researchers at the University of Granada, in collaboration with the Polytechnic University of Milan (Italy) have designed a multispectral imaging system capable of obtaining information from a total of 36 colour channels, as opposed to the usual 3 colour image sensors.

Researchers at the University of Granada have designed a new imaging system capable of obtaining up to twelve times more colour information than the human eye and conventional cameras, which implies a total of 36 colour channels. This important scientific development will facilitate the easy capture of multispectral images in real time, and in the not too distant future it could also be used to develop new asisted vehicle driving systems, identify counterfeit bills and documents or obtain medical images much more accurate than current ones, among many other applications.

The scientists, from the Color Imaging Lab group at the Optics Department, University of Granada, have designed this new system using a new generation of sensors—which were developed at the Polytechnic University of Milan—in combination with a matrix of multispectral filters to improve their performance.

Colour image sensors can be found in all common types of digital cameras and devices (reflex, automatic, webcams, cell phones, tablets, etc.) and they have an architecture that consists of a monochrome sensor (in black and white), covered with a layer of colour filters (commonly, red, green and blue, also known as RGB). This architecture only extracts information from one of these three colours in each pixel within the image. To extract the information from the rest of colours in each pixel, it is necessary to apply algorithms which in most cases are among manufacturers’ best-kept secrets.

According to the PI in this group, Miguel Ángel Martínez Domingo, “the new sensors developed at the Polytechnic University of Milan are called Transverse Field Detectors (TFD) and they are capable of extracting the full colour information from each pixel in the image without the need for a layer of colour filter on them.

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