Actually I do not know whether the next story exactly happened 40 years ago, but at least around that time. As a young PhD student we were invited to act as daily coach for MSc students who were working on their thesis project. And because my own PhD project was focusing on CCDs, also the MSc projects I had to coach had to do with CCDs.
At that time one of my colleagues, Peter Schreurs, was working on an analog CCD memory for a picture-in-picture (PiP) applications, a project sponsored by Barco. Peter designed a CCD memory of about 100 x 80 CCD cells (I do not recall the exact dimensions anymore, but it must have been something alike). But this analog memory could also be used as an image sensor, a kind of full-frame CCD architecture. And together with the department Traffic Control, we proposed an MSc thesis project to build a solid-state camera (based on Peter’s CCD) for traffic monitoring (measuring width, length, speed, location on the road, … of cars that passed by the camera).
There were two groups of MSc students that worked on the project. The first group prepared the camera hardware, the second group worked on the software. It is remarkable to look to the names of these guys : the first group was Jan Vermeiren (still in imaging, now with Caeleste) en Wim Verhaer (I lost track of him), the second group was Jan Bosiers (in imaging till very recently, just retired from Teledyne) and Ludo Pingnet (I lost track of him). Next to the camera hardware and software to allow the complete set-up to work as a traffic monitor, the guys also build some demo set-ups. I still remember that a small race-track was put together with some electric cars (toys) running around the track. The CCD camera nicely could take pictures and the micro-processor attached to it could monitor the parameters of the cars passing under the camera. It is a pity that I do not have any pictures left taken by the CCD. The images of 100 x 80 pixels of a full-frame CCD at the end of the ‘70s were probably not of the same quality as the ones we have today in our mobile phones 😉
A second demo and test was a real life experiment : the guys were sitting on the second floor of the building near a window. The camera was mounted on a long wooden stick and hand held outside the window, while monitoring the parking lot. The undersigned was driving with his car in small circles around the building and underneath the camera. In the mean time the set-up was counting how many times my car passed. And the set-up passed the tests !
Amazing to remember how technology was developed with very limited means, but it was a lot of fun. Every step taken in the development of the system was revealing something new. This piece of work even resulted in my very first publication (see Harvest Imaging website, with a photograph of the race track).
We all had a great time, thanks Jan, Wim, Jan and Ludo.
Albert, 13-10-2020.