1.8 Gigapixel Camera on Hummingbird

credit: US army

The U.S. Army is getting ready to deploy its Hummingbird drone to Afghanistan which is equipped with a 1.8 gigapixel color camera. That's right, Giga not Mega. It is 900 to 1,800 times better than a typical cellphone image with 1 to 2 million pixels, enough to track people and vehicles from altitudes above 20,000 feet.

The camera is called ARGUS-IS which stands for "Autonomous Real-time Ground Ubiquitous Surveillance-Imaging System". In Greek mythology, Argus is a watchman with 100 eyes. While tracking people and vehicles from altitudes above 20,000 feet, It will be able to scan almost 25 square miles.

ARGUS-IS's processing system compresses the massive amount of data collected to what's most valuable to warfighters, such as movement or changes on the ground. Then it transmits this data to operations centers and troops operating in the area in multiple, real-time video streams at the rate of 10 frames per second.

Read more about this new camera here.