Scientific Photography and Applied Imaging

25 High speed photography and photonics

25.1 Introduction

25.1.1 Motion studies

Many events involving motion occur in too short a period of time to be perceived. The general limitations of human visual perception have been covered in Chapter 2 and those concerning time and motion have been detailed by Hyzer (1986). Visual inertia limits minimum visual response time to some 0.1s and foveal vision has a maximum RP of 30 cycles/ degree (≈ 1 arc. min) with a maximum response at 3 cycles/degree. For a moving subject, ocular pursuit is limited to some 120 degrees s^-1 or ≈ 2 rads s^-1. A selection of subjects and their typical velocities are given in Table 25.1.

A number of varied and diverse fields require detailed analysis or study of fast events, ...