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Technology

A fly's-eye view for spies in the sky

By Tom Simonite

1 November 2006

WHEN autonomous aircraft start buzzing over our heads like giant insects, they could be fitted with video cameras that give them wide-angle vision to rival that of insects themselves.

Previous attempts to achieve this have mimicked the compound eyes that insects use to create a mosaic of partially overlapping images (Âé¶¹´«Ã½, 6 May, p 30). This works well for spotting movement, but is not so good at picking out individual objects from a complicated scene.

Now Christel-loic Tisse and Hugh Durrant-Whyte at the University of Sydney, Australia, and Andrew Hicks from Drexel University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, have come…

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