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Now, researchers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have developed a novel, continuously running camera that captures images roughly a thousand times faster than any existing conventional camera.

In a paper in the April 30 issue of Nature, UCLA Engineering researchers Keisuke Goda, Kevin Tsia and team leader Bahram Jalali describe an entirely new approach to imaging that does not require a traditional CCD (charge-coupled device) or CMOS (complementary metal-oxide semiconductor) video camera. Building on more than a decade of research on photonic time stretch, a technique for capturing elusive events, the team has demonstrated a camera that captures images at some 6 million frames per second.

"The most demanding application for high-speed imaging involves fast events that are very rare, rogue events or the proverbial needle in the haystack — in other words, unusual events that carry important information," said Jalali, a professor of electrical engineering and principal investigator of the project.

The new imager operates by capturing each picture with an ultrashort laser pulse — a flash of light only a billionth of a second long. It then converts each pulse to a serial data stream that resembles the data in a fiber optic network rather than the signal coming out of a camera. Using a technique known as amplified dispersive Fourier transform, these laser pulses, each containing an entire picture, are amplified and simultaneously stretched in time to the point that they are slow enough to be captured with an electronic digitizer...