Whether it’s robots operating in a catastrophic area, autonomous cars coming around the city, or machines that can be seen in space through satellites, clouds, fog, and fog – it’s incredibly useful – and scientists have built the best system yet.
The newly developed system works through an algorithm that measures the motion of individual light particles or photons, such as fired from a laser into a fast pulse, and is used to reconstruct objects that are obscure or hidden from the human eye.
What makes technology so special is the way it can recreate the light that has been scattered and bounced through the barrier.
In the experiments, the laser sight was able to see the see objects hidden behind a 1-inch layer of foam.
(Stanford Computational Imaging Lab)
“A lot of imaging techniques make images look a little better, a little less noisy, but this is really where we make the invisible visible,” says Gordon Wetstein, an electrical engineer at Stanford University.
“This is really pushing the boundaries that are made possible by any kind of sensory system. It’s like a superhuman vision.”
As the laser light passes through the barrier – the foam, in this study – only a few photons hit the object behind it, and even fewer bring it back. Still, the algorithm is smart to use those small bits of information to rearrange the hidden recon budget.
Officially, it is known as Confocal Diffuse Tomography, and while it is not the first method of looking at obstructions like this, it offers a lot of improvements – for example, it can work without knowing how far the hidden object is.
The system is capable of working even without relying on ballistic photons, as other approaches do – these are photons that can travel to a hidden object in a scattered field, but without distorting themselves.
“We were interested in scattering images without scattering and collecting all the scattered photons to reconstruct the image,” said David Lindell, an electrical engineer at Stanford University.
“This makes our system especially useful for large-scale application, where there will be very few ballistic photons.”
Large-scale applications such as navigating self-driving cars in heavy rain, for example, or even getting images of the Earth’s surface (or other planets) through Cloud Hayes – have many potential uses. Researchers are eager to experiment with more scenarios and more scattered environments.
Current systems are not particularly good at dealing with light scattering caused by fog and mist.
The leader, for example, is brilliant at detecting objects that the human eye cannot see, but begins to have trouble when rain or fog interferes with its detailed laser scan. Next down the line, this system can fix that problem.
Before we move on to ourselves, it is worth noting that a scan using this method can take anywhere from a minute to an hour, so there is still plenty of plenty of optimization to work with.
That said, it is an impressive feat to recreate a rec object hidden in three dimensions that the human eye cannot see.
“We’re excited to move this forward with other geometries of scattering,” Lindell says.
“So, it’s not just the objects hidden behind a thick slab of objects, the objects are densely embedded in the scattered material, which would be like looking at a fog-like object.”
Research has been published in Nature Communications.
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