Researchers have designed a new imaging system capable of obtaining up to 12 times more colour information than the human eye and conventional cameras.
Scientists at the University of Granada in Spain said the scientific development will facilitate the easy capture of multispectral images in real time.
In the future it could also be used to develop new assisted vehicle driving systems, identify counterfeit bills and documents or obtain medical images much more accurate than current ones, among many other applications.
The scientists 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.
"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," said researcher Miguel Angel Martinez Domingo.
"In order to do so, they take advantage of a physical phenomenon by virtue of which each photon penetrates at a different depth depending on its wavelength, ie, its colour.
"In this way, by collecting these photons at different depths on the silice surface of the sensor, the different channels of colour can be separated without the necessity of filters," Domingo said.
