Can you take a picture of someone sitting behind a wall? Well scientists at MIT can, they have developed a new camera that collects scattered light from a body that is hiding behind the wall. This camera is not an ordinary DSLR camera but its resolution is 2 picoseconds i.e. it can sense scattered light with sub-nano seconds sensitivity.
Abstract:
The recovery of objects obscured by scattering is an important goal in imaging and has been approached by exploiting, for example, coherence properties, ballistic photons or penetrating wavelengths. Common methods use scattered light transmitted through an occluding material, although these fail if the occluder is opaque. Light is scattered not only by transmission through objects, but also by multiple reflection from diffuse surfaces in a scene. This reflected light contains information about the scene that becomes mixed by the diffuse reflections before reaching the image sensor. This mixing is difficult to decode using traditional cameras. Here we report the combination of a time-of-flight technique and computational reconstruction algorithms to untangle image information mixed by diffuse reflection. We demonstrate a three-dimensional range camera able to look around a corner using diffusely reflected light that achieves sub-millimetre depth precision and centimetre lateral precision over 40 cm×40 cm×40 cm of hidden space.
Andreas Velten, Thomas Willwacher, Otkrist Gupta, Ashok Veeraraghavan, Moungi G. Bawendi & Ramesh Raskar
Nature Communications 3, Article number: 745 doi:10.1038/ncomms1747 Received 12 September 2011 Accepted 13 February 2012 Published 20 March 2012
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