Friday, November 19, 2010
MIT femto-camera sees around corners
From The Hindu
The next time you accuse someone of having tunnel vision, make sure it is not Ramesh Raskar. The Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is leading a team that is developing a “femto-second transient imaging system”, or a camera that can look around corners and beyond the line of sight.
Speaking to The Hindu, Mr. Raskar said the principle behind the device was “very much like a CAT scan”, which takes multiple photographs and used mathematical inversion to piece together images.
He added that potential applications for femto-photography included search-and-rescue planning in hazardous conditions, collision avoidance for cars, and robots in industrial environments. His website notes that transient imaging also has significant potential benefits in medical imaging, allowing endoscopes to view around obstacles inside the human body.
Mr. Raskar's team describes the process using the simple example of a room with an open door. The goal is to compute the geometry of the object inside the room by exploiting light reflected off the door. The device directs an ultra-short laser beam emitted by the “femto-second laser” (femto-second is a quadrillionth of a second, or one-millionth-of-one-billionth of a second) on to the door, from where it scatters inside the room. The light reflected from objects inside the room again falls on the door and is reflected toward the transient imaging camera. An ultra-fast array of detectors measures the time profile of returned signal from multiple positions on the door.
Mr. Raskar says, “We analyse this multi-path light transport and infer shapes of objects that are in direct sight as well as beyond the line of sight. The analysis of the onsets in the time profile indicates the shape; we call this the inverse geometry problem.”
In comments to media, Mr. Raskar added, “It is like having X-ray vision without the X-rays... But we are going around the problem rather than going through it.”
Mr. Raskar said to The Hindu that his team had initial results that they were not sharing publicly yet. The device should be fully developed in the next year or so.
When that happens, it could well revolutionise innumerable routine process based on line of sight.
The next time you accuse someone of having tunnel vision, make sure it is not Ramesh Raskar. The Associate Professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is leading a team that is developing a “femto-second transient imaging system”, or a camera that can look around corners and beyond the line of sight.
Speaking to The Hindu, Mr. Raskar said the principle behind the device was “very much like a CAT scan”, which takes multiple photographs and used mathematical inversion to piece together images.
He added that potential applications for femto-photography included search-and-rescue planning in hazardous conditions, collision avoidance for cars, and robots in industrial environments. His website notes that transient imaging also has significant potential benefits in medical imaging, allowing endoscopes to view around obstacles inside the human body.
Mr. Raskar's team describes the process using the simple example of a room with an open door. The goal is to compute the geometry of the object inside the room by exploiting light reflected off the door. The device directs an ultra-short laser beam emitted by the “femto-second laser” (femto-second is a quadrillionth of a second, or one-millionth-of-one-billionth of a second) on to the door, from where it scatters inside the room. The light reflected from objects inside the room again falls on the door and is reflected toward the transient imaging camera. An ultra-fast array of detectors measures the time profile of returned signal from multiple positions on the door.
Mr. Raskar says, “We analyse this multi-path light transport and infer shapes of objects that are in direct sight as well as beyond the line of sight. The analysis of the onsets in the time profile indicates the shape; we call this the inverse geometry problem.”
In comments to media, Mr. Raskar added, “It is like having X-ray vision without the X-rays... But we are going around the problem rather than going through it.”
Mr. Raskar said to The Hindu that his team had initial results that they were not sharing publicly yet. The device should be fully developed in the next year or so.
When that happens, it could well revolutionise innumerable routine process based on line of sight.
Labels: femto-photography, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
# posted by Narayan Lakshman @ 9:27 AM 
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