High-speed Camera - Uses in Science

Uses in Science

High-speed cameras are frequently used in science in order to characterize events which happen too fast for traditional film speeds. Biomechanics employs such cameras to capture high-speed animal movements, such as jumping in frogs and insects, suction feeding in fish, and the strikes of mantis shrimp, using motion analysis of the resulting sequences from one or more cameras to characterize the motion in either 2-D or 3-D.

The move from film to digital technology has greatly reduced the difficulty in use of these technologies with unpredictable behaviors, specifically via the use of continuous recording and post-triggering. With film high-speed cameras, an investigator must start the film then attempt to entice the animal to perform the behavior in the short time before the film runs out, resulting in many useless sequences where the animal behaves too late or not at all. In modern digital high-speed cameras, the camera can simply record continuously as the investigator attempts to elicit the behavior, following which a trigger button will stop the recording and allow the investigator to save a given time interval prior to the trigger (determined by frame rate, image size and memory capacity during continuous recording). Most software allows saving only a subset of recorded frames, minimizing file size issues by eliminating useless frames before or after the sequence of interest. Such triggering can also be used to synchronize recording across multiple cameras.