Even the fastest high-speed chase on “COPS” would never require anything this fast, but engineers at the UCLA Henry Samueli School of Engineering and Applied Science have devised a camera able to shoot at a rate of approximately 6 million frames per second.

Using photonic time stretching techniques, the camera’s imager — no CCD or CMOS imagers in this camera — uses ultrashort laser pulses to capture impressions in a billionth of a second. The resulting stream of impressions are amplified and stretched in time using an amplified dispersive Fourier transform until they are slow enough to be captured with an electronic digitizer.

The developers say the serial time-encoded amplified microscopy technology behind the camera enables continuous real-time imaging at a frame rate of greater than six megahertz, a shutter speed of less than 450 picoseconds and an optical image gain of more than 300.

The camera is described in a the April 30 issue of Nature by UCLA Engineering researchers Keisuke Goda, Kevin Tsia and team leader Bahram Jalali.

Expected applications for the camera include observing shockwaves, communication between living cells, neural activity, laser surgery and elements of blood analysis.