Argus Panoptes, a mythological creature, is the namesake of a digital camera technology currently being developed by Dr. Marc Christensen and a team of other engineering professors, graduate students and undergraduate students.
“Argus Panoptes had 100 eyes, so he was thought to be the ultimate sentry,” Dr. Christensen said.
The technology, called PANOPTES, was inspired by the mythological creature and shares the concept that 100 eyes are better than one.
But in this case it’s cameras – tiny, low-definition cameras – very similar to those found in cell phones. This inventive technology has garnered attention from the army due to its national defense applications, and SMU’s School of Engineering stands to receive $1 million in a federal funding as part of the 2008 Defense Appropriations Bill, if approved by Congress.
PANOPTES, which stands for Processing Arrays of Nyquist-limited Observations to Produce a Thin Electro-optic Sensor, could make the government’s unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) more cost effective.
The government currently uses UAVs, like the MQ-1 Predator UAV, for reconnaissance. That particular plane cost $40 million in 1997, according to the U.S. Air Force Web site. Constantly flying the plane, which has a wingspan of nearly 50 feet, is also costly to the military.
But the large planes are necessary in order to support the weight and size of the large, high-performance cameras used for gathering military information.
But if the camera is smaller, then the unmanned aerial vehicle could shrink to a six-foot wingspan, Dr. Christensen said. A decrease in size would mean less money spent on the vehicle and the fuel to power it. This would allow the military to purchase more aerial unmanned vehicles, and increase the amount of intelligence it could gather.
And unmanned aerial vehicles are just one application for the technology.
“We’re working on an architecture of a better, flat camera,” Dr. Christensen said. “It could go on a soldier’s helmet – anywhere you’d love to have a camera, but can’t fit the big journalism SLR.”
Not just one camera, but hundreds of cameras.
“The military is looking towards this swarm of cameras and we’re providing the eye,” he said. “We’re finding a way to combine all the images from the tiny cameras to get a picture as good as a large, high-performance camera.”
Imagine there are 100 tiny cameras on a sheet of paper. All of these cameras will take slightly different pictures of an object. In PANOPTES, these cell phone-quality pictures are then automatically combined in the computer’s system to collaboratively create a “markedly better image.”
Dr. Dinesh Rajan suggests the following scenario: “For instance, you have a hostage situation, you slide it under the door on a sheet of paper.”
There are three individual technologies that have been developed for PANOPTES. After five years and $1.7 million, through grants from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the Office of Naval Research and the Army Research Lab, Dr. Christensen’s team has modeled each of the three separately to prove each is possible.
“Now, showing that we can do all three in the same technology is what the new money is about,” Christensen said.
Dr. Christensen’s team includes SMU Electrical Engineering professors Dr. Rajan, Dr. Scott Douglas, Dr. Panos Papamichalis and Dr. Ping Gui. Christensen has also worked closely with Dr. Sally Wood at Santa Clara University and one of her graduate students. There are also seven SMU graduate students and three undergraduate students contributing to the project.
The $10 million bill, which has been championed by Sen. Kay Bailey Hutchison, will fund four other universities in the Metroplex: The University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas in collaboration with The University of Texas at Dallas, The University of North Texas’ Institute for Science and Engineering Simulation, The University of Texas at Arlington and the University of Texas at Dallas.
