Posted January 30, 2013 by Mufaddal Fakhruddin in

Meet ARGUS, the 1.8 billion-pixel surveillance camera

argus-is camera

Soon governments could employ a single surveillance camera that could keep watch on entire cities, and maybe even entire countries. In fact, they might be using them right now, but that's entirely classified.

Meet ARGUS-IS, a 1.8 billion-pixel surveillance camera that can capture and record a field of view of almost 65 square miles at once. With this field of view, the ARGUS-IS can keep track of every moving object like cars and even people, and do so in extremely high-definition detail (for example, it can zoom in to see a person wave and see what they have wore).

It stores more than 1 trillion of video data every day, and can provide real-time access to history of any particular point on its map.

To keep cost down, the ARGUS-IS uses hundreds of regular cameras (the ones found in smartphones) and stitches images together to create a 1.8 billion-pixel image.

Co-developed by DARPA and the U.S Army, the ARGUS-IS can be installed in UAVs and drones. In fact, the U.S Army is preparing to equip an unmanned aircraft called Hummingbirg with it, to survey and spy Afghanistan from an altitude of 20,000 feet.

Mufaddal Fakhruddin (follow @mufaaf on twitter)

Mufaddal Fakhruddin is a Marketing Degree unlocker'er, but decided he would rather criticize products than sell them. So he became a writer. With Tbreak Media for the past 7 years, Mufaddal writes for Tbreak Tech and sister site, IGN Middle East.