Arducam Launches Beastly 108-Megapixel USB 3.0 Camera Evaluation Kit for Computer Vision
Offering 1.3 frames per second of 12000×9000 RAW10 imagery, this USB 3.0 camera kit is the company's highest-resolution model yet.
Computer vision specialist Arducam has announced another camera model, and if you thought its recent Hawk-eye 64-megapixel version was impressive prepare to be blown away: its latest creation offers a massive 108-megapixel sensor.
"Our engineering team spent half a year prospecting and did numerous validations with dozens of in-market phone sensors, [and] they ended up building something really big," says Arducam's Lee Jackson of the company's latest design. "The latest in our USB 3 camera dev kit family boasts 108MP with a total of 12000×9000 effective pixels and a motorized focus lens."
The new camera builds on the company's existing USB 3 camera evaluation platform, designed to accept image sensors typically used in smartphones. Previously, the company had demonstrated the platform driving sensors from 0.3 megapixel VGA models up to 21 megapixels — but its latest build blows its predecessors out of the water, beating even the company's recently-launched 64-megapixel Hawk-eye camera module.
The full evaluation kit offers the ability to capture full-resolution RAW10-format 12000×9000 imagery at 1.3 frames per second, rising to 11 frames per second if you drop the resolution to 4000×3000, using a rolling shutter system. The sensor module communicates with the USB board via two-lane MIPI DSI, and the motorized auto-focus system offers adjustment from 8cm (around 3.15") to infinity.
"The price points of industrial cameras are unrealistic for SMBs [Small to Medium Businesses] and indie makers/researchers with low-budget projects, and for those who want to build lean, cost-effective vision solutions at a large scale, affordable alternatives are needed," Jackson claims. "With a focus on agility and flexibility, we developed a system that is capable of adopting the technological advancements in today’s high-end phone cameras and transforming them into hackable solutions everyone can use."
More details on the evaluation kit are available on the Arducam store, where the device is available to order priced at $399 including the 108 megapixel sensor, sensor board, and USB 3.0 interface board. Software development kits are provided for C/C++ and Python, alongside examples designed to run on the NVIDIA Jetson family.