--- title: Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner | daily.dev description: A talk from EMF 2026 about using an industrial linear (line-scan) camera pointed out of a train window to capture extremely wide panoramic images. The speaker... canonical: https://daily.dev/posts/using-the-railway-network-as-a-flatbed-scanner-aljtwgojg twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:site: @dailydotdev og:type: website og:site_name: daily.dev og:title: Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner | daily.dev og:description: A talk from EMF 2026 about using an industrial linear (line-scan) camera pointed out of a train window to capture extremely wide panoramic images. The speaker... og:url: https://daily.dev/posts/using-the-railway-network-as-a-flatbed-scanner-aljtwgojg og:image: https://api.daily.dev/og/posts/AljtwgOJg.png og:image:alt: Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner og:image:width: 1200 og:image:height: 630 og:locale: en --- > ## Documentation Index > Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://daily.dev/llms.txt > Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further. # Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner **[Hacker News](https://daily.dev/sources/hn)** · 1 min read · 0 upvotes · 0 comments ## Summary A talk from EMF 2026 about using an industrial linear (line-scan) camera pointed out of a train window to capture extremely wide panoramic images. The speaker covers the challenges of measuring train speed accurately, capturing thousands of lines per second in real time, and the subsequent problems of processing and displaying the resulting ultra-wide images. ## Full article daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: ## Community take How the wider developer community reacted, aggregated from 1 discussion and 50 comments across hackernews (as of 2026-08-01). **TL;DR:** The Hacker News community is enthusiastic about this creative hack, sharing related prior art (slit-scan photography, Adam Magyar's work, SR-71 reconnaissance cameras) and engaging in light technical debate about speed measurement and video vs. line-scan approaches. **Sentiment:** 80% positive · 15% mixed · 5% skeptical **The case for** - Commenters praised it as a genuinely fun, art-meets-engineering hack worth doing just for the sake of it. - Several noted the project has a rich lineage in aerial/satellite line-scan photography, validating the technical approach. - The resulting gallery images were highlighted as impressive outputs worth seeing. **The pushback** - One commenter suggested using full-frame video with frame-to-frame correlation might have been an easier path to post-processing. - Phone GPS alone was questioned as insufficient inside a train (potential Faraday cage effect), though the presenter already addressed this with a combined GPS+accelerometer setup. **By community** - hackernews (positive): Commenters are broadly enthusiastic, sharing related prior art and engaging in friendly technical tangents rather than raising serious objections. **Hottest debate:** Whether a full-frame video approach would have been easier to post-process than a dedicated line-scan camera. **Open questions** - Where can the full-resolution output images be viewed (answered in thread: philo.gay/linecam/gallery.html)? - Could consumer phone panorama modes be adapted to do time-slice-based capture instead of scene-based stitching? **Highlights** > I love this so much! This is such a cool hack, just for the sake of it. Amazing hacking and amazing art! In the preso, she has said the full size output is on the website- can anyone see what that link is? I didn't find it on the video page, but I might've just missed it. > — [slipheen on hackernews · 2 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49127868) > The first attempt was with video, but she later switched to exactly that, a 19000 lines per second 2048 pixel line scan imager. It was augmented with 6dof acceleration/gyro sensor, gps, and microcontroller to get the data to a laptop. > — [mikewarot on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49128685) > well, they used film, which made it very easy to implement. this is easy with a roll of film and a slit for an exposure window. you have the lens and the aperture and focus and all of that, but instead of a full frame, you mask it down to a small slit. slowly pull the film across the slit when it's time to capture your target. captures are limited only by how much film you can fit on a reel and feed through the camera during flight. I would expect that miles of film could be carried on the SR-71 without problems. You'd need (I assume) some custom machines to develop that film properly and to produce prints, but that's not a challenge for an entity that can design and build an SR-71. > — [naikrovek on hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49129196) > Random thought: if you stick a camera to each train you might know their location better than Deutsche Bahn does. > — [inigyou on hackernews · 1 comments](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49129160) **Source threads** - [hackernews](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49126919) · 58 points · 50 comments ## Similar posts on daily.dev - [Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner](https://daily.dev/posts/using-the-railway-network-as-a-flatbed-scanner-lc2yidf5w) · Lobsters · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Panoramic Photography With A Linear Scanner](https://daily.dev/posts/panoramic-photography-with-a-linear-scanner-poafdenxm) · Hackaday · 0 upvotes · 0 comments - [Optical Fiber Networks Can Keep Rail Networks Safe](https://daily.dev/posts/optical-fiber-networks-can-keep-rail-networks-safe-flasldecl) · IEEE Spectrum · 0 upvotes · 0 comments --- Tags: [#computer-vision](https://daily.dev/tags/computer-vision), [#image-processing](https://daily.dev/tags/image-processing) [View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/using-the-railway-network-as-a-flatbed-scanner-aljtwgojg) ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"Organization","@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization","name":"daily.dev","url":"https://daily.dev","logo":{"@type":"ImageObject","url":"https://daily.dev/apple-touch-icon.png","width":180,"height":180},"sameAs":["https://twitter.com/dailydotdev","https://github.com/dailydotdev","https://www.linkedin.com/company/daily-dev-ltd"]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https://daily.dev/#website","url":"https://daily.dev","name":"daily.dev","publisher":{"@id":"https://daily.dev/#organization"},"potentialAction":{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https://daily.dev/search?q={search_term_string}"},"query-input":"required name=search_term_string"}}]} {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"TechArticle","headline":"Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner","url":"https://daily.dev/posts/using-the-railway-network-as-a-flatbed-scanner-aljtwgojg","mainEntityOfPage":{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https://daily.dev/posts/using-the-railway-network-as-a-flatbed-scanner-aljtwgojg"},"datePublished":"2026-07-31T20:58:09.815Z","dateModified":"2026-08-01T03:19:49.772Z","description":"A talk from EMF 2026 about using an industrial linear (line-scan) camera pointed out of a train window to capture extremely wide panoramic images. 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