<\/u>Actually I do not know whether the next story exactly happened 40 years ago, but at least around that time.\u00a0 As a young PhD student we were invited to act as daily coach for MSc students who were working on their thesis project.\u00a0 And because my own PhD project was focusing on CCDs, also the MSc projects I had to coach had to do with CCDs.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 But this analog memory could also be used as an image sensor, a kind of full-frame CCD architecture.\u00a0 And together with the department Traffic Control, we proposed an MSc thesis project to build a solid-state camera (based on Peter\u2019s CCD) for traffic monitoring (measuring width, length, speed, location on the road, \u2026 of cars that passed by the camera).<\/p>\n
There were two groups of MSc students that worked on the project.\u00a0 The first group prepared the camera hardware, the second group worked on the software.\u00a0 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).\u00a0 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.\u00a0 I still remember that a small race-track was put together with some electric cars (toys) running around the track.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 It is a pity that I do not have any pictures left taken by the CCD.\u00a0 The images of 100 x 80 pixels of a full-frame CCD at the end of the \u201870s were probably not of the same quality as the ones we have today in our mobile phones \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n
A second demo and test was a real life experiment : the guys were sitting on the second floor of the building near a window.\u00a0 The camera was mounted on a long wooden stick and hand held outside the window, while monitoring the parking lot.\u00a0 The undersigned was driving with his car in small circles around the building and underneath the camera.\u00a0 In the mean time the set-up was counting how many times my car passed.\u00a0 And the set-up passed the tests !<\/p>\n
Amazing to remember how technology was developed with very limited means, but it was a lot of fun.\u00a0 Every step taken in the development of the system was revealing something new.\u00a0 This piece of work even resulted in my very first publication (see Harvest Imaging website, with a photograph of the race track).<\/p>\n
We all had a great time, thanks Jan, Wim, Jan and Ludo.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Albert, 13-10-2020.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Actually I do not know whether the next story exactly happened 40 years ago, but at least around that time.\u00a0 As a young PhD student we were invited to act as daily coach for MSc students who were working on their thesis project.\u00a0 And because my own PhD project was focusing on CCDs, also the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1806","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/harvestimaging.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1806","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/harvestimaging.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/harvestimaging.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harvestimaging.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harvestimaging.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1806"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/harvestimaging.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1806\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1807,"href":"https:\/\/harvestimaging.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1806\/revisions\/1807"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/harvestimaging.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1806"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harvestimaging.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1806"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/harvestimaging.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1806"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}