High speed strobe photography
AssigneeThe United States of America as represented by the Secretary of the Air Force
InventorsJoel Bixler, Allen Kiester, Gary Noojin
Life of this patent
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Abstract
A high speed photography system and method. The system and method use a split beam laser which is recombined after passing through an image then passed through a scanning apparatus, such as a rotating mirror, to form an image upon construction by a frame alignment algorithm. The image may be a 3D image. The system and/or method of constructing an image may use a plurality of laser beams as sourced from a single split beam or as sourced from a plurality of lasers.
Claims20
A high speed photography system comprising:
- a stage for supporting an object or event to be photographed;
- a source for at least one pulsed laser beam to be convergently directed at the object or event, whereby each pulsed at least one laser beam can be reflected by or divergently pass through the object or event;
- a scanning device for dividing the single pulsed laser beam into separate trajectories, each trajectory having a plurality of frames with a frame rate of at least 2 E5 FPS;
- a single image sensor having at least 1 megapixel for receiving the pulses of the single beam trajectories according to a time of arrival of that beam at the image sensor, the pulses being configured for and thereby forming a photograph of the object or event upon alignment of the pulses into a single image;
- and
- a single trigger for capturing all frames at one in a single package on the image sensor.
A high speed photography system comprising:
- a stage for supporting an object or event to be photographed;
- a source for at least one laser beam to be convergently directed at the object or event, whereby each pulsed laser beam of the at least one laser beam can be reflected by or divergently pass through the object or event;
- a rotating mirror for dividing the single pulsed laser beam into separate trajectories, each trajectory having plural frames with a frame rate of 1 E6 FPS to 2 E7 FPS;
- a single image sensor having at least 4 megapixels for receiving the pulses of the single beam trajectories according to a time of arrival of that beam at the image sensor, the pulses being configured for and thereby forming a photograph of the object or event upon alignment of the pulses into a single image;
- and
- a single trigger for capturing all frames at one in a single package on the image sensor.
A method for photographing an object or event of interest disposed on a stage, the method comprising the steps of:
- convergently pulsing at least one laser beam towards the object or event whereby each laser beam passes through or is reflected from the object or event;
- directing the laser beam to a scanning device to reflect the laser beam therefrom onto a single image sensor having at least 0.5 megapixels of a camera in separate beam trajectories;
- and
- recombining the separate beam trajectories into independent frames and aligning the frames to yield a photograph of the object or event.
Dependencies are inferred from the claim text.