Unispectral Camera Sees Inside Pictures

Smartphones have completely changed the way we do everything. It’s not just texting and surfing the web, but taking pictures and video and uploading them to social media constantly. I’ve been taking pictures of food since well before there was such a thing as Instagram, at first to share on message boards with fellow cooks and now because I run my own food blog and Facebook page. Often, it’s food I’ve made (as that’s the entire point of the blog), but I also take pictures of food in restaurants, sometimes so I can study them later to see if I can’t reproduce a dish at home.

The Unispectral Camera was not developed with someone like me in mind, but I can easily see how I could make use of it. What it does is analyze the chemical composition of the thing you’re photographing. Their example (as in the picture above) is a glass of whiskey. Just take a photo of it like you normally would, and the camera will use hyperspectral imaging to analyze exactly what’s in it. It then projects those components on the screen, along with their percentages in the item.

Of course, in order for this to be helpful, it’ll have to be paired with a database of various substances and their hyperspectral signatures (the camera uses light rays invisible to the human eye to map electromagnetic “fingerprints” of each component), but that could be easily accomplished with an app and cloud computing. A working prototype is currently under development at Tel Aviv University, and they hope to have it completed by this June.

Source: Gizmag