The colour science and technology of mobile phone cameras and of their big brothers used by scientists and engineers in a rapidly growing number of high-value applications.
Mobile phone cameras capture a scene using a flat matrix of detector pixels, each of which comprises four smaller pixels covered with coloured filters, one red, two green and one blue. After processing, the original scene is reproduced on the display’s own individual pixels as a mixture of emissions from four emitters with colours that correspond to those in the filters covering the camera’s detector pixels.
The prevalance of such three-colour capture / display technologies in phones, cameras, monitors, TVs, etc., derives from the trichromacy theory of human vision developed in the 19thC.
There are new, rapidly advancing, technologies that capture 1000s of separate “colours” present in a scene. They target the underpinning physical and chemical science of features in a scene and are not limited by the evolutionary cul-de-sac of human vision.
The talk will explore these new technolgies by illustrating how they work and their many applications in remote sensing, medicine, engineering, archaeology, art conservation, and food production and processing.
Dr Robin Devonshire is Director and CTO of Faraday Scientific Ltd. Following a BSc in Physics and Chemistry at Durham, a PhD in Photochemistry at Newcastle, and a 3-Year PDRA at Cornell University, he joined the Chemistry Department at Sheffield University. There he taught physical chemistry and chemical physics, particularly spectroscopies, and established the largest UK university R&D activity in thermal, discharge and solid-state light sources (modelling, measurement, and theory). The group had contracts with 41 UK and overseas companies in its last quinquennial review. He chaired the International Scientific Committee of the LS syposia on light source science and technology for over 30 years.
Robin is a frequent visitor to Japan and China (he is Professor Adjunct at Fudan University in Shanghai), consults on IP and technical due diligence, and is active in high-tech start-ups as investor, mentor, and director. He was founding investor and Chairman of IN-PART (www.in-part.co.uk) a UK company that facilitates global university-industry tech-transfer and which currently has over 200 of the world’s leading universities as subscribers and nearly 10,000 global company users.
The talk is free and no booking required.