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SPECIAL ISSUE: Infrared Imaging

This edition commemorates the centenary of the first published infrared images by Professor Robert Williams Wood. These infrared photographs appeared in the October 1910 edition of the Royal Photographic Society Journal. What I hope this edition will show you is that the use of infrared and infrared imagery has blossomed since those early images and is an extremely versatile technological field with many applications and capabilities. Read more about Infrared Imaging on the BBC Viewfinder

 
 Highlighted article: Insights into animal temperature adaptations revealed through thermal imaging, G J Tattersall 

Infrared thermal technology allows for the real-time visualization of fixed or transient changes in the long-wave radiative energy emanating from an object.  In essence, this allows us to estimate surface temperature of objects, whether living or inert.  Animal surface temperatures are, therefore, readily detected using this technology.  These measurements are crucial to understanding physiological changes that occur through the regulation of body temperature.

In this paper, we introduce some recent advances made possible and enhanced through the use of thermal imaging.  In particular, this imaging technology has shed light on the regulation of peripheral blood flow in “warm-blooded” animals, on the dynamics of animal heat transfer in complex thermal environments, on the production of heat associated with metabolism, and on the importance of evaporation to respiratory function and its potential contribution to preventing overheating of the brain. 

More than a simple imager for temperature, this technology has the potential to contribute a greater understanding toward animal thermal adaptations, not only since it provides live information on surface temperatures, but more importantly because of its non-invasive nature which allows non-destructive measurements to be obtained without disturbance to the animal.  My laboratory makes use of infrared thermal imaging in the field and in the lab, where we can assess simple aspects of thermal biology of amphibians and reptiles in the field, to more complex changes in surface temperatures associated with the regulation of peripheral blood flow.

Guest Editor: Dr Mark Richardson
Volume 58, Number 5, October 2010

SPECIAL ISSUE: High Speed Photography and Photonics

This issue of the Imaging Science Journal is devoted largely to papers on the various uses of high speed photography and photonics. Although high speed photography is widely used in the scientific community, it may not be familiar to some readers. There have been many definitions put forward over time. One problem was that once the research advantages evident in high speed photography became apparent, the development of faster framing rates and shorter exposure times proceeded at a very fast pace. With the mistaken assumption that advances would not progress so far, so fast, region descriptions quickly outran normally used superlatives, thus resulting in a rather odd listing.

Guest Editor: Mr P W W Fuller
Volume 57, Number 6, December 2009

SPECIAL ISSUE: Holography

So when, and how, did holography emerge? The making of a hologram clearly depends on the possession of a coherent light source, which the invention of the laser eventually supplied. However, the interference of two light beams had already been demonstrated as early as 1802 by Thomas Young, and clothed with the garment of mathematical respectability by Heinrich Helmholtz some years later, so that all the principles that underlay holography were known by the 1850s, roughly the same time as photography became of age. However, it was a further 50 years before Gabriel Lippmann employed the principles of interference in image making.

Highlighted article: Colour holography: the ultimate 3D imaging technique
H I Bjelkhagen

Ultra-Realistic Imaging may be defined as any imaging technique which is able to record and reconstruct the visible electromagnetic light-field scattered from a real-world object or scene with a resolution better than or equal to that of the unaided human eye. The paper “Colour holography: the ultimate 3D imaging technique” by H I Bjelkhagen describes how ultra-realistic imaging based on modern colour holography can be attained through the application of the interferential imaging method. Holography was discovered more than sixty years ago and quickly it became obvious that it constituted a unique imaging principle with enormous possibilities. But the role of holography as a technique of true ultra-realistic imaging is only just now becoming possible. In the beginning it was only possible to record monochromatic 3D images. The lack of colour recording possibility prevented display holography to become popular and used as a new imaging technique. It is only recently that high-quality colour hologram images can be recorded. This is caused by improvements in the photosensitive recording materials, the chemical processing schemes, the recording lasers and not least, the illumination source with which recorded holograms is displayed. The new nano-structured ultra-fine-grain recording materials are totally key to ultra-realistic holographic imaging. It took a long time before panchromatic photosensitive materials of sufficient resolution as well as compact narrowband RGB lasers were available.
The paper describes multi-laser-wavelength holography which is able to record colour 3D images which are almost indistinguishable from real objects. Such ultra-realistic 3D images have been of increasing interest from museums as a vehicle for both archival and for travelling exhibitions. Examples of recorded colour holograms of museum artefacts are provided in the paper. Illumination sources, used for displaying the holograms, are of fundamental importance to holography as they dictate how the holographic image replays. Of particular importance are the new LED and laser diode sources. They may be expected to improve the displayed image properties of the polychromatic volume reflection hologram.

Guest Editor: John Webster
Volume 59, Number 2, April 2011

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