A canon hack development kit implementation of time domain continuous imaging

Time Domain Continuous Imaging (TDCI) is a new model for photography that allows exposure timing to be freely manipulated after capture. This is done by creating, and operating on, a continuous waveform representation of how the value of each pixel changes over time. However, at this writing, there are no sensors that directly implement TDCI capture. The FourSee multi-camera prototype enables temporally-skewed exposures to be captured using the four component cameras and then later post-processed to create a TDCI representation, but the postprocessing is awkward and requires upload of image data to a separate computer. In contrast, this paper reports on a method whereby a single, conventional, Canon PowerShot camera can be used as a stand-alone TDCI platform. The camera programming is enhanced by custom code which is loaded into the camera using the Canon Hack Development Kit (CHDK). Thus, using code that should be portable to most camera models supported by CHDK, an inexpensive Canon PowerShot camera is able to internally capture and manipulate TDCI streams in the new.tik (Temporal Image Kontainer) file format.