Boeing Completes Key Tests Of Self-Protection System

Boeing has announced that it has successfully completed tests of the Counter Measures Dispenser System (CMDS) for Project Wedgetail, Australia's Airborne Early Warning and Control (AEW and C) system. The tests were conducted in September and October off the Washington coast and over Puget Sound, Wash.

Completion of CMDS testing is a key step toward verification of the Wedgetail AEW and C aircraft's overall Electronic Warfare Self-Protection (EWSP) capability. EWSP is designed to warn aircrews about and protect against missiles targeting the aircraft.

The CMDS responds to threats by releasing chaff and flares to decoy incoming missiles away from the aircraft. Boeing and its industry supplier, BAE Systems, developed and integrated the CMDS system.

Testing included 19 flights that dispensed more than 500 units of chaff and flares. The AEW and C team collected data via five high-speed video cameras mounted on the Wedgetail aircraft and an additional video camera attached to a T-33 chase plane.

"The testing program verified that the Boeing-installed self-protection system will effectively counter its intended threats reliably and safely," said Kermit Hollinger, Electronic Warfare manager for Boeing AEW and C Programs.

"This milestone is the latest example of Boeing's ability to integrate military systems onto commercial aircraft and provide our customers with low-risk, cost-effective solutions to their operational requirements."

Project Wedgetail includes six 737 AEW and C aircraft plus ground support segments for mission crew training, mission support and system maintenance.

The 737 AEW and C aircraft, based on the Boeing Next-Generation 737-700 commercial airplane, is designed to provide airborne battle-management capability with an advanced multirole electronically scanned radar and 10 state-of-the-art mission crew consoles.

Able to track airborne and maritime targets simultaneously, the mission crew can direct offensive and defensive forces while maintaining continuous surveillance of the operational area.

A Lightweight Display Brings Instant Army Intelligence to Your Wrist

A special-ops soldier carries a slew of gadgets into battle. There's the GPS unit to pinpoint his squad's location, and a laptop for pulling up blueprints of terrorist compounds or infrared readings of buildings scoped out by robotic surveillance drones. With a radio and its five-pound battery, it's too much gear. But in a couple years, troops could lighten their load with a rugged, flexible, wrist-mounted display that's in development by the U.S. Army and HP Labs.
The solar-powered, bendable computer screen will allow for instant data and radio transmission, all in a half-pound unit, says David Morton, the program manager for flexible electronics at the Army Research Laboratory. The display's thin layer of transistors sends electric signals to an e-ink screen, which converts those signals into grayscale images, similar to the way the Amazon Kindle does. Unlike the Kindle, the two-by-three-inch display can bend to fit around the user's wrist because HP stamps the electronics and optical components onto pliable plastic. The process eliminates the need for the fragile glass backing used in the Kindle and other displays, says Carl Taussig, the director of information surfaces at HP. "You can strike these things with a mallet, and they just keep on working."

While the Army works on a color screen, troops will test the black-and-white device and provide feedback for the final version, which should be ready for military use by 2011.

Darpa's First Robotic Ornithopter Hovers, Flies Like a Hummingbird

A few years from now, bird-watchers may be in for a double take: that flapping creature in the distance? Nope, not a bird. Mutant dragon fly? Nope--it's Darpa's latest unmanned aerial robo-sentinel, inspired by the flight mechanics of birds.

The tech company Aerovironment recently won a $2.1 million contract to further their work on the Nano Air Vehicle (NAV). One of many progressive projects from Darpa (the Pentagon's advanced-research unit), the NAV is the first-ever "controlled hovering flight of an air vehicle system with two flapping wings that carries its own energy source and uses only the flapping wings for propulsion and control," says Aerovironment.

In the future, Darpa plans to use the teeny NAV for secret indoor and outdoor government missions, like dropping off listening devices and other cargo, and transmiting sound and video to locations as far as a kilometer away.

The above tasks are, presumably, ones that any small air vehicle could take on--which raises a question: cool factor aside, how is the ornithopter better than any run-of-the-mill tiny helicopter? According to Darpa, the advantages lie in something called the Reynolds number, a measurement of airborne efficiency that is lower (and technologically better) for flying creatures (like hummingbirds) compared to regular aircraft.

Aerovironment plans to make the next batch of birds smaller (10 grams and 7.5 cm), faster (22 mph), quieter, and more wind-resistant.

Australia has launched a multi-million dollar competition to build a new generation of military robots.

The winning design must help soldiers fight by remote control in urban combat zones, defence officials say.

The aim is to reduce casualties in urban areas where fighting is unpredictable and treacherous.

The competition is being run by Australia's Defence Science and Technology Organisation in partnership with the US military.

'Dirty work'

The government wants to develop an "intelligent and fully autonomous system" capable of carrying out dangerous surveillance missions.

Senior officials in Canberra have said they hope that unarmed robotic vehicles will do some of the army's "dirty work" in such hazardous theatres.

The ultimate plan is for groups of these sophisticated machines to be sent into battle to help neutralise the enemy.

Research grants of $1.6m (£984,000) have been offered in this joint Australian and American competition. Five shortlisted applicants will be invited to present their ideas at a Land Warfare Conference in Brisbane in November next year.

Before they get to that stage they will have to prove that their prototypes can do the job at a defence base in South Australia, where they will be judged by an international panel of military experts.

Radio-controlled bullets leave no place to hide

A RIFLE capable of firing explosive bullets that can detonate within a metre of a target could let soldiers fire on snipers hiding in trenches, behind walls or inside buildings.

The US army has developed the XM25 rifle to give its troops an alternative to calling in artillery fire or air strikes when an enemy has taken cover and can't be targeted by direct fire. "This is the first leap-ahead technology for troops that we've been able to develop and deploy," says Douglas Tamilio, the army's project manager for new weapons for soldiers. "This gives them another tool in their kitbag."

The rifle's gunsight uses a laser rangefinder to calculate the exact distance to the obstruction. The soldier can then add or subtract up to 3 metres from that distance to enable the bullets to clear the barrier and explode above or beside the target (see diagram).

As the 25-millimetre round is fired, the gunsight sends a radio signal to a chip inside the bullet, telling it the precise distance to the target. A spiral groove inside the barrel makes the bullet rotate as it travels, and as it also contains a magnetic transducer, this rotation through the Earth's magnetic field generates an alternating current. A patent granted to the bullet's maker, Alliant Techsystems, reveals that the chip uses fluctuations in this current to count each revolution and, as it knows the distance covered in one spin, it can calculate how far it has travelled.

The rifle would allow a soldier faced with a sniper firing from a window to take a distance measurement to the window, add a metre, fire through the window, and have the round detonate 1 metre inside the room. The same method could be used to fire behind a wall or over a trench.

As it stands, Tamilio says, soldiers faced with enemies behind cover have the option of using grenade launchers, which have limited range and accuracy, or asking for artillery fire or air strikes. However, both of those options cover a large area and so have a higher risk of killing civilians, especially in urban areas. They are also expensive. "You could shoot a Javelin missile, and it would cost $70,000. These rounds will end up costing $25 apiece. They're relatively cheap," Tamilio says.

"This airburst shell gives the close-combat capability of a grenade launcher, combined with the ability of indirect fire weapons to hit stuff on the other side of the wall," says John Pike, a defence analyst with Washington DC think tank GlobalSecurity.org.

Pike says it is just one example of "smart" munitions now possible because of microchip advances.

Although the rifle will initially use high-explosive rounds, it might later use versions with smaller explosive charges that aim to stun rather than kill.

The US army plans to field-test prototypes of the rifle soon, possibly in Iraq or Afghanistan, and hopes to begin using it by 2012.

How to fit 300 DVDs on one disc

A new optical recording method could pave the way for data discs with 300 times the storage capacity of standard DVDs, Nature journal reports.

The researchers say this could see a whopping 1.6 terabytes of information fit on a DVD-sized disc.

They describe their method as "five-dimensional" optical recording and say it could be commercialised.

The technique employs nanometre-scale particles of gold as a recording medium.

Researchers at Swinburne University of Technology in Australia have exploited the particular properties of these gold "nano-rods" by manipulating the light pointed at them.

The team members described what they did as adding three "dimensions" to the two spatial dimensions that DVD and CD discs already have.

They say they were able to introduce a spectral - or colour - dimension and a polarisation dimension, as well as recording information in 10 layers of the nano-rod films, adding a third spatial dimension.

The scientists used the nanoparticles to record information in a range of different colour wavelengths on the same physical disc location. This is a major improvement over traditional DVDs, which are recorded in a single colour wavelength with a laser.

Also, the amount of incoming laser light absorbed by the nanoparticles depends on its polarisation. This allowed the researchers to record different layers of information at different angles.

The researchers thus refer to the approach as 5-D recording. Previous research has demonstrated recording techniques based on colour or polarisation, but this is the first work that shows the integration of both.

As a result, the scientists say they have achieved unprecedented data density.

Their approach used 10-layer stacks composed of thin glass plates as the recording medium. If scaled up to a DVD-sized disk, the team would be able to record 1.6 terabytes - that is, 1,600 gigabytes - or over 300 times the quantity stored on a standard DVD.

Significant improvements could be made by thinning the spacer layers and using more than two polarisation angles - pushing the limits to 10 terabytes per disc and beyond, the researchers say.

Bit by bit

Recent efforts based on holography have shown that up to 500 Gb could potentially be stored on standard DVD-sized disks.

Holographic methods take all of the information to be recorded and encode it in the form of a graph showing how often certain frequencies arise in it.

That means that the recording process is a complex, all-at-once, all-or-nothing approach that would be difficult to implement on an industrial scale.

By contrast, 5-D recording is "bit-by-bit", like current CD and DVD writing processes in that each piece of information is read sequentially.

That is likely to mean that recording and read speeds would be comparatively slow, but the approach would be easier to integrate with existing technology.

"The optical system to record and read 5-D is very similar to the current DVD system," says James Chon, a co-author on the research.

"Therefore, industrial scale production of the compact system is possible."

Now that the method has been demonstrated in custom-made multi-layer stacks, the team is working in conjunction with Samsung to develop a drive that can record and read onto a DVD-sized disc.

Dr Chon says that the material cost of a disc would be less than $0.05 (£0.03), but there are a number of advantages in moving to silver nano-rods that would bring that cost down by a factor of 100.

For optical data storage expert Tom Milster, at the University of Arizona, the beauty of the approach is in its simplicity.

"It's not just elegant - there are a lot of experiments that are elegant - it's relatively straightforward," he told BBC News.

For the moment, Dr Milster says, the equipment needed to write the data would make a commercial system expensive. However, that has not stopped the development of optical storage solutions in the past.

"For example, a Blu-ray player is not an easy system to realise; they've got some wonderful optics in there," Dr Milster said. "People thought that would be pretty difficult to do, but others managed to do it."

Proposed Cyber Security Legislation

Amid calls for a comprehensive national strategy on cyber security, as well as stronger government leadership to ensure that security initiatives are implemented effectively, Sen. John D. Rockefeller IV and Sen. Olympia Snowe proposed a sweeping piece of legislation to address this significant and growing threat to the United States. This legislation comes in the wake of attacks on the Pentagon late last year and in the shadow of recent news of massive cyber espionage efforts spanning over 100 countries.

The following represent the major provisions of the proposed legislation at this time. Everyone should expect changes to be made as it works its way through the legislative process.

1. Legislation proposed by Senator John D. Rockefeller IV and Senator Olympia Snowe calls for the establishment of an Office of the National Cyber Security Advisor that would take the lead on Internet security matters and coordinate with the Defense Department, intelligence community and the private sector.

2. The proposed legislation calls for the creation of a Cyber Security Advisory Panel that is composed of outside experts from industry, academia, and nonprofit groups that would advise the president on related matters.

3. The proposed legislation calls for the creation of a public/private clearinghouse for cyber threats and vulnerability information sharing, establishment of measurable and auditable cyber security standards from the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

4. The proposed legislation would also require that cyber security professionals be licensed and certified.
   Provision: The proposed legislation would also require that the Cyber Security Adviser conduct a review of the U.S. cyber security program every four years and require officials to complete a number of reviews and reports.

5. The proposed legislation calls for the creation of state and regional cyber security centers to help small and midsize businesses adopt security measures.

6. The proposed legislation would establish a Secure Products and Services Acquisitions Board that would to review and approve the security and integrity of products purchased by the federal government.

7. The proposed legislation would require government and private sector networks that control the critical infrastructure to comply with a set of cyber security standards established by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

This legislation is past due! Report after report has highlighted the increased complexity and frequency of cyber attacks on business, government and our critical infrastructure. Delays in pushing this legislation through could have serious consequences. So time is of the essence in preparing for the passage and enactment of this legislation.

I offer the following recommendation for consideration in order to strengthen the proposed legislation. The legislation as it stands does not address mandatory reporting requirements of cyber security breaches, data and information theft and other cyber security related issues. If we are to track our progress, learn from these events and rapidly identify new cyber threats, mandatory reporting within 24 hours of discovery is critical. Another area of concern is training. While the proposed legislation touches on training, it does not specifically address continuing education. Cyber attack techniques and criminal scams are highly dynamic and rapidly evolving.

These factors combine to make continuing education necessary to stay aware of the latest developments in cyber security. A third concern rests in the area of testing, validation and verification of hardware and software. While this is not specifically addressed, it may be bundled into support and funding for research and development of new validation and verification capabilities that are needed to mitigate this threat. The visibility of this issue has risen significantly after Alex Allan, Chairman of the British Joint Intelligence Committee, expressed his growing concern because government departments, the intelligence services and the military were all exposed to threats from computer and network hardware that came from foreign (citing the new BT Telecom network).
Finally, I was disappointed the legislation did not address an appointee to coordinate and push for an international accord that establishes open cooperation during investigations of cyber attacks and crime and also to stem the development of strategic cyber weapons.

While the devil is in the details, I think the proposed legislation modified to include the four areas identified above is a huge step in securing our nation against cyber threats. And while the proposed legislation is mainly reactive, proactive measures can go a long way to reducing risks.

By Kevin Coleman

New Battery Technology Charges in Seconds

For the successful takeover of alternative energy over conventional sources of energy we need a good battery technology too for power storage. The devices we want to keep on using need to be recharged. And we all know that recharge takes hours whether it’s our mobiles or laptops. If the researchers from MIT has implemented the know-how of these lithium-ion batteries, successfully then our waiting hours for recharge will be over.

This development can transform the power storage technology and can help hybrid cars or electric cars and give the necessary push to renewable energy. This expertise can reduce the weight and size of the batteries and our devices can be charged within few seconds.

The researchers, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, have already made a small prototype cell that charges fully in 10 to 20 seconds, compared with six minutes for cells made in the standard way. The researchers are of the view that this technology will be available commercially within two to three years, because they are not using some new material. They have also nicknamed this technology as the “beltway battery”, after the orbital motorway in Washington DC. His lithium-ion battery utilizes a bypass system that allows the lithium-ions to enter and leave the battery speedily. The scientists discovered that by coating particles of lithium iron phosphate in a glassy material called lithium pyrophosphate, ions behave differently. These ions can bypass the channels and move more quickly. As we are acquainted with the fact that rechargeable batteries store up and discharge energy as charged atoms, known as ions, from between two electrodes called the anode and the cathode. Their charge and discharge rate are restricted by the speed with which these ions move.

If MIT scientists successfully complete this project for commercial use, we can charge electric car batteries in less than one hour. Till now recharging is one of the greatest hurdles for mass production of electric cars. Solar and wind energy generation can also be benefited with this breakthrough. This lithium-ion battery can be utilized for storage of excess energy.

Fresh start for lost file formats

Long lost file formats could soon be resurrected by pan-European research.

The 4.02m euro (£3.58m) project aims to create a universal emulator that can open and play obsolete file formats.

Using the emulator, researchers hope to ensure that digital materials such as games, websites and multimedia documents are not lost for good.

The emulator will also be regularly updated to ensure that formats that fall out of favour remain supported in the near and far future.

Called Keeping Emulation Environments Portable (Keep), the project aims to create software that can recognise, play and open all types of computer file from the 1970s onwards.

As well as basic text documents it will also let people load up and play old computer games that technology has left behind.

"People don't think twice about saving files digitally - from snapshots taken on a camera phone to national or regional archives," said Dr Janet Delve, a computer historian from the University of Portsmouth and one of the research partners on Keep.

"But every digital file risks being either lost by degrading or by the technology used to 'read' it disappearing altogether," she said.

Without work to preserve ways to access the formats that are common today, 21st century citizens risk leaving a "blank spot" in history, said Dr Delve.

Already the number of unreadable documents in archives is beginning to mount up.

Britain's National Archive estimates that it holds enough information to fill about 580,000 encyclopaedias in formats that are no longer widely available.

Research by the British Library estimates that the delay caused by accessing and preserving old digital files costs European businesses about £2.7bn a year.

"We are facing a massive threat of the loss of digital information. It's a very real and worrying problem," said Dr David Anderson, who will work with Dr Delve on the UK end of the project.

"Things that were created in the 1970s, 80s and 90s are vanishing fast and every year new technologies mean we face greater risk of losing material," he said.

Dr Anderson said emulation was more workable in the long term than the usual method of preserving old files which involves migrating information on to new formats with its attendant risks of data degradation and corruption.

Face-blurring technology raises privacy questions

Interesting Article but if you've got nothing to hide why the hell would you worry.

31 January 2009 by Paul Marks

SHOULD we modify our conception of privacy thanks to the seemingly unstoppable spread of CCTV surveillance networks? Jack Brassil thinks so. He's a computer scientist at Hewlett-Packard's laboratory in Princeton, New Jersey, who is testing a technology called Cloak that aims to limit the extent of privacy invasions. "Rather than prohibit surveillance, our system seeks to discourage surveillers distributing video without the authorization of the surveilled," he says.

Cloak has two key requirements. First, CCTV users, such as municipal councils and businesses, would have to sign up to a system that electronically obscures the faces of people who do not want their pictures to be published in video footage that is passed to others. The list of such people would be akin to the national "do-not-dial" lists designed to prevent cold-calling, Brassil says.

Second, the person opting in to Cloak needs to carry a "privacy enabling device" - most conveniently a phone with GPS capability. This wirelessly beams the user's position and velocity to a central server which forwards the data to the CCTV's control centre. Image processing software then uses the subject's trajectory to identify and obscure their face in the CCTV footage if it is to be distributed. In Hewlett-Packard's simulations, the technology is workable, even in dense crowds.

The idea raises broad societal and legal questions, however. "I don't think its objectives are right at all," says privacy analyst Ian Brown of the Oxford Internet Institute in the UK. "People shouldn't have to opt in to get privacy protection. And this system actively invades your privacy because it tells the service where you are at all times."

Brassil concedes that his proposed solution may not suit everyone, but says the important point is the discussion of privacy. Brown also notes that there are transatlantic legal differences to contend with. In Europe, data protection laws prevent surveillance videos being passed on while only a few states in the US have such legislation. He says another way forward is to encourage engineers to design privacy into technologies from the start.

Brown will have his work cut out, says Brassil, who is to publish his work as part of a book on video surveillance later this year. "Technology is advancing far faster than our ability to understand its privacy implications," he says.

Broadband on Rails A compact lens could make high-speed Internet access commonplace on trains.

Internet access can make a train trip far more productive and enjoyable. But train-mounted satellite dishes that send and receive data can't be used on a lot of routes, as the standard hardware is too big to fit in some tunnels. Now researchers at the University of York, in England, have developed an alternative: a dome-shaped plastic lens that's less than half as high as a typical satellite dish. The system, which was developed with funding from the European Space Agency, is also designed to track multiple satellites at once, making it more reliable than a dish.

"Here in the U.K., a lot of our railway infrastructure is very old," says John Thornton, a research fellow in the Department of Electronics at the University of York, who led the lens research. Low bridges and tunnels offer minimal headroom for satellite dishes, which Thornton says are about 62 centimeters high. Thornton's lens, in contrast, is only 30 centimeters high--short enough to meet the needs of the train industry.

The York project is based on an existing design, called a Luneburg lens. "The traditional approach would be to make [the lens] out of novel materials with certain properties," says Thornton. "I thought, 'What materials are practical and could work?'" Ultimately, the team decided on the plastics polyethylene and polystyrene, which are less expensive than the materials traditionally used to make Luneburg lenses but achieve the necessary performance. Thornton says that recent laboratory tests confirmed that the lens was able to receive digital video broadcasts, meaning that it could handle at least four megabits of data per second.

The York system also offers increased reliability. With a traditional satellite system, a separate dish is required for each satellite, and the whole dish has to move to track the signal. Moving an entire dish is fine if it's mounted on a stable structure, such as the roof of a house, but not if it's affixed to the side of a train that's running through tunnels and under bridges. A lot of room is required around the device at all times, to ensure that it doesn't hit something while tracking a signal.

With Thornton's device, incoming radiation bounces off the surface on which the lens is mounted. The lens concentrates the reflected radiation to a single point on its surface, where it's collected by a motorized antenna called a feed. To track the signal, only the feed needs to move, as opposed to the entire dish in a conventional system. Moreover, several feeds can roam around the surface of the lens at once, collecting signals from satellites in different locations.

Having extra feeds increases the redundancy of the system, Thornton says. "If one of the possible feeds isn't working, then you've got a spare." Different beams could also be enlisted for different services, he says, noting that one could be used to provide live television while another is used for Internet access.

Ratul Mahajan, a researcher with Microsoft's networking group who has been working on wireless Internet connections for cars, questions why Thornton chose to use satellite Internet instead of 3G, a telecommunications standard that's becoming common in cellular-telephone networks. "Why use satellite at all?" Mahajan asks.

Thornton says that 3G currently doesn't have the kind of geographic coverage required for continuous Internet access along train routes. Upgrades to the cell network, he says, tend to be concentrated in towns. "Each base station can only offer the highest data rates to users typically one or two kilometers away, so a truly vast number would be needed to cover all the railway routes in a country the size of the USA, or even France," Thornton says.

Thornton is currently trying to find a commercial partner for his system but admits that it's not ready to hit the rails just yet. In fact, it has yet to be tested on a moving vehicle. The team still needs to develop a control system and protocols for handling multiple satellite feeds.

By Rachel Kremen

Charging gadgets using a magnet

Magnetic induction could soon spell the end of tangled cables and a frustrating hunt for the gadget's charger.

Two firms at CES showed off ways to use the phenomenon to re-charge batteries inside gadgets when they are laid on a special mat.

Sensing systems allow devices with very different voltages to be charged at the same time.

The technology can also be used to power household objects such as flat screen TVs or kitchen appliances.

Israeli company Powermat uses RFID tags to identify what is being laid down to charge. The RFID tags are held in a case made to fit around popular gadgets such as iPods, laptops, and mobile phones.

When a gadget is laid down on a Powermat, it reads the RFID tag to ensure that each device only gets the charge it needs.

"It can charge a 100-watt gadget side by side with an iPod Nano that is very low power," said Ron Ferber, president of Powermat. "It knows what's on the mat."

A series of Powermats, including travel versions, should be on sale in the US by Autumn 2009, said Mr Ferber.

Also at CES, Leggett and Platt showed off a line of devices called eCoupled, made by Fulton Innovation, which uses a different method of identifying gadgets.

Leroy Johnson, senior director of emerging technologies at Leggett and Platt, said its system embeded a signal in the induction coil fitted to a gadget that helps charge it up.

"Inside each device is a coil that sends an identification signal that says 'I'm a flashlight with a three-volt Li-on battery'," he explained.

"It's almost like plugging it in, but instead you just set it down," he added. The first products fitted with the eCoupled technology should appear by late 2009, said Mr Johnson.

He said the technology was safer too, because it almost removed the need to plug devices into a wall socket.

The charging plates produced by both Powermat and Leggett can be embedded in walls, counter tops, or furniture to turn them into power stations for recharging or powering any gadget or item placed upon them.

In late December 2008, five companies joined together in a bid to create universal standards for wireless power systems. Initially, they want to develop a five-watt standard and address more power hungry gadgets.

Nanotech could mean sharper snaps

Researchers in Scotland have been given nearly half a million pounds to try to improve digital camera images.

The team, lead by scientists at the University of Glasgow, are developing small nanostructures that would be used on light detecting image sensors.

These new hi-tech chips would be used in camera equipment to produce sharper and more colourful images.

The project is being funded by a £489,234 grant from the Engineering & Physical Sciences Research Council.

The researchers are using a phenomenon called surface plasmon resonance, which is an effect exhibited by certain metals when light waves fall onto their surfaces.

In digital cameras, this is the metal film used on microchip image sensors - known as a CMOS (Complementary Metal-Oxide Semiconductor) - that detect light waves and convert them into digital signals.

When light shines on the metal film, electrons on the surface absorb the energy of the light waves and begin oscillating, or shaking, in groups. The resultant combined waves are called plasmons, and they modify the way light is distributed around the metal. The CMOS then measures the light and assigns it a digital value which is then used to build up the bigger image.

The Scottish scientists hope to find a way of creating patterns or small nanostructures in the metal film on the CMOS. This should increase the sensitivity of the sensor and result in higher quality images.

"We'll be using nanotechnology to manipulate particles, so as to take advantage of the properties of electrons to create a new optical effect," Professor David Cumming of Glasgow University who is leading the research team.

"Digital imaging has come a long way in recent years and this project aims to further improve the ability of digital devices to produce high-quality pictures," he added.

Researchers also want to try and "tune" resonating plasmons into the same frequency as light, which could improve colour discrimination.

The project is expected to last until the middle of 2012.