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Comment by pontifier | Hacker News Reader

Several years ago I had an idea for a camera made from harmonically oscillating pixels that shift frequency based on intensity. It would have many of the advantages of event cameras, but with extremely accurate absolute brightness measurent as well.

Does anyone know if this exists?

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Sounds like MKIDs - microwave kinetic inductance detectors. They're arrays of little LC oscillators where the inductance changes when a photon hits. They can actually resolve frequency and time of arrival of a photon, which is super useful, especially for photon-limited astrometry. [0] [1]

[0] - https://wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_inductance_detector

[1] - https://web.physics.ucsb.edu/~bmazin/mkids.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_inductance_detector

FTFY

This isn't really the same thing (and I think compressed sensing might be the direction of research to check out further) but you might find it interesting - check out the modulo camera; https://web.media.mit.edu/~hangzhao/modulo.html

> A modulo camera could theoretically take unbounded radiance levels by keeping only the least significant bits. We show that with limited bit depth, very high radiance levels can be recovered from a single modulus image with our newly proposed unwrapping algorithm for natural images.

You would still need to digitize the signal coming from the pixels, and the bandwidth required for each pixel would be commensurate to the rate at which you wish to capture tge information.

That seems like a lot of pixel busses.

Actually the one nice thing about this architecture is that if each pixel had its own oscillator you could dump them all on to the same bus until you reach the bandwidth of your ADC.

Only in your imagination, it seems

OT: but does anyone else see OP's post as posted 1min after his responder's?

Yes

Something weird with timestamps is going on. If I look at my comment stream the correct time is listed.

I posted my comment yesterday.

dang, is this something you need to be aware of?

It's an artifact of the submission re-upping system as described here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19774614

Righteo, thanks for clearing that up.

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