Azamgarh boy develops low-cost camera sys

Varanasi: When Azamgarh was struggling to explore a way to come out of its image of notoriety, a rural boy was dreaming to compete on the global stage with limited resources.
The boy, Yogeshwar Nath Mishra, who studied in a village school, today is a 34-year-old young scientist on a mission.
Mishra who had developed the world’s fastest camera at Nasa has now developed a low-cost camera system at IIT Indore.
For him, the journey from Azamgarh to California was not so easy, as his farmer father Rajendra Nath Mishra had to make a lot of sacrifices to let him achieve his dreams. “Despite all hardship, my father managed to give me a good education. I got family support for my academic pursuits,” Mishra told TOI. “The world of science has always fascinated me since my childhood, and the great aerospace scientist and former President late APJ Abdul Kalam inspired me greatly,” said Mishra, who hails from Paikoli village in Sathiaon block of Azamgarh district.
“I am also a visiting faculty at IIT Indore and have developed a low-cost camera system for simultaneously imaging four combustion species using a single DSLR camera for them,” said Mishra. The low-cost camera setup has been developed at IIT Indore in collaboration with the University of Gothenburg in Sweden and NASA-Caltech in the USA. This camera setup named as CL-FRAME has been developed for snapshot multispectral imaging of four chemical species in the flame using a single DSLR camera. Mishra along with Prof Devendra Deshmukh at the department of Mechanical Engineering supervised this project. The study was published in the “Applied Optics” Journal of the Optical Society of America (Optica). This low-cost setup can be developed for research in labs that are lacking high-end equipment and camera systems.
Mishra is part of a team at NASA, Caltech that has invented the world’s fastest laser sheet imaging technology that can help in the study of nanoparticles in flames.
According to him, against capturing 30 frames per second by the regular cameras, the new invention has achieved 12.5 billion frames per second. One can only see the light’s origin, but it is impossible to see its real-time movement.
“But it allows one to see light in action traveling in a material or a medium,” he claimed. His areas of interests include laser spectroscopy, light-matter interaction, and sustainable technologies. According to him, the new imaging system can give significant leverage to studies on combustion, which leads to the formation of several chemical species from hydrocarbons. Besides, flying an aeroplane or launching a rocket also leads to the burning of hydrocarbons.
He said that a light sheet was used to cut through a three-dimensional object to give information about a specific segment of the object. This invention is the fastest camera for planar imaging, in which the team has combined compressed sensing with streak camera technology.
Mishra explained that the burning of fuel leads to soot formation from the Poly Aromatic Hydrocarbons (PAH) which are nano-sized particles. With its ultra-fast imaging, this new technology will track how PAH is responsible for the formation of soot particles. As the formation lasts within nanoseconds and sub-nanoseconds, the ultra-fast imaging is needed, which could prove to be a boon to areas like biomedical imaging and or tracking any process which is induced by light.