Researchers at the University of Granada have designed a new imaging system capable of obtaining up to twelve times more color information than the human eye and conventional cameras, which implies a total of 36 color channels. The important scientific development will facilitate the easy capture of multispectral images in real time.

The technology could be used in the not-too-distant future to create new assisted vehicle driving systems, to identify counterfeit bills and documents, or to obtain more accurate medical images than those provided by current options.

The scientists, from the Color Imaging Lab group at the Optics Department, University of Granada, have designed the new system using a new generation of sensors, in combination with a matrix of multispectral filters to improve their performance.

Transverse Field Detectors (TFDs) extract the full color information from each pixel in the image without the need for a layer of color filter on them.

In order to do so, the TFDs take advantage of a physical phenomenon by virtue of which each photon penetrates at a different depth depending on its wavelength, i.e., its color. In this way, by collecting these photons at different depths on the silice surface of the sensor, the different channels of color can be separated.

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