Future of imaging technology

Measurements and/or controls are normally made at one point in a wide area or space by making the assumption that conditions in the area or space are uniform, in spite of the fact that phenomena in the natural and artificial worlds are actually distributed. It is very desirable that distributed phenomena are measured just as they are, and because of the progress in large-scale integration (LSI) and micromachining technologies, measurements of phenomena of plural dimensions are being realized: not a point, but a line, area, space, space plus time and N dimensions. A new concept for such multi-dimensional measurements is proposed by the author as 'imaging technology', and it is classified into three groups: pattern imaging, tomographic imaging and microscopic imaging. Pattern imaging consists of images made from the outputs of plural sensors. Tomographic imaging is where images are made with the technology of computed tomography. In microscopic imaging images of very small size are enlarged with microscopic methods. Several examples for each type of imaging are given.