Thursday, May 24, 2007

CMOS and Rolling Shutter Effect


DSC00733, originally uploaded by tossthecam.

We have posted examples and discussion of this effect, capable of being extremely exaggerated by Camera Tossing. At the time I was speculating from experience and observation, deciding to call it "focal plane sensor distortion", borrowing from "focal plane shutter distortion" known previously and exhibited in slit scanning techniques.

Well it turns out many imaging scientists have been tackling the problem/effect for the purposes of producing accurate cheap CMOS based camera sensors for robotics. In the digital world, it is referred to as a rolling shutter effect, caused by exactly the reasons we speculated on.

tossthecam , whose photo is posted above, dug up an research article from Harvard addressing the possibilities of capitalizing on this property of CMOS technology for application in robotics as sensors for structure-form-motion problems.

Geometric Models of Rolling-Shutter Cameras
Marci Meingast; 29 Mar 2005
arXiv:cs/0503076v1 [cs.CV]
download as a PDF

Knowing what to search for, I was also able to dig up this abstract purely on correcting for this effect. But who would want to do that! ;-)

Rolling shutter distortion correction
Liang, Chia-Kai; Peng, Yu-Chun; Chen, Homer; 07/2005
2005SPIE.5960.1315L
read the abstract

I love imaging scientists!

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

how we can create all these effects? what program you use?

Unknown said...

@easy...

As the article mentions. These effects rely on no software specifically... rather a particular property of the camera used (CMOS with "Rolling Shutter"). It is pure (digital) photography with no software based post-processing necessary. Try googling for "slit-scan" photography to see related effects produced with film cameras.

Jack Cabbage said...

Nice post. Interesting stuff.