Bee Hive Intelligent Camara Array

The RayShaper BeeHive Intelligent Camera Array system is the front-end and torchbearer of a revolutionary computer vision system that features a highly modular design. Each hexagonal module (‘cell’) as a professional-grade 4K120 video camera with MTF mount would accommodate a wide range of high-quality lenses – and through adaptors, an even large variety of professional-grade lenses. Cells can be quickly connected using grooves on the exterior body, which may provide electronic connectivity for control and synchronisation purposes. Depending on the application, the number of cells, focal lengths and cell poses can be configured so that the same system can be used to provide spatial resolutions of over 1 billion pixels at 120fps, as well as panoramic and immersive capturing, such as light field and 6 degrees-of-freedom (6 DoF) content production. Compared with ultra-high-resolution and light field camera systems currently on the market that use legacy architectures, BeeHive provides higher performance at a much cheaper cost. The widening application of ultra-high-resolution video also necessitates operation in challenging conditions such as low lighting, high dynamic range, and in bad weather such as smog, rain and snow storms. The system can perform real-time enhancement of visual information acquired in challenging conditions. Furthermore, by proactively adjusting the aperture, shutter, ISO and other parameters of visual information acquisition by the cells, and through differentiated ‘spot’ exposure, the system further extends the dynamic range and low lighting performance far beyond the 'native’ capabilities of cell cameras with signal-processing-based enhancement alone. A further inherent limitation to ultra-high-resolution imaging is the presence of optical artefacts such as the airy disc, which creates inherently blurred images. By using deep-learning-based information fusion, BeeHive mitigates and eliminates many artefacts created by the optical system, while also correcting ‘blur’ resulted from fundamental physics limits. The BeeHive camera system is integrated with a high performing, low latency, broadcast quality ultra-high-definition video compression system, which allows the output of the system to be efficiently stored and broadcast over wireless, wired, and satellite channels. Computational vision is a revolutionary paradigm of digital imaging. By proactively using a family of intelligent algorithms to dynamically control, enhance and optimise each step of the visual information acquisition, storage, transmission, composition and presentation, computational vision systems can provide technical capabilities, visual qualities and effects that are far beyond the realms of existing systems. A new way of ‘seeing’ is here, let there Bee! Red Dot Award: Design Concept | Ready to Launch | Smart