Ever wondered if you could see beforehand if a vehicle is coming from the opposite direction at a turning rather than waiting or honking? Ever thought how rescue operations in mines or during fires could be a lot easier if you could see exactly where the trapped victim is?
Well, a group of science wizards at the Massachusetts Institute of technology have come up with an invention that could answer some of these questions- lets say hello to a laser camera that can see through corners.
The device constructs a basic image of a hidden scene by collecting tiny amounts of light that bounce off the scene.
For this, first, the camera which is called a femtosecond transient imaging system fires an ultra-short high-intensity burst of laser light to illuminate the scene. The laser is on for only a trillionth of a second. Light reflects off all surfaces including the walls and the floor.
If there is a corner, some of the light will be reflected around it. It will then continue to bounce around the scene, reflecting off objects or people hidden around the bend. Some of the light thus reflected comes back to the camera which can be mathematically sampled and reconstructed.
Image Courtesy: http://www.bbc.co.uk
This smart method is known as "time-gating" and is commonly used by cameras in military surveillance aircraft to peer through dense foliage. The camera shutter remains shut when the light, initially reflected from the top of trees comes back and it opens later to capture the light reflected from the vehicles or objects beneath the canopy. The camera then samples back the image. Everything is merely based on proper timing.
Professor Ramesh Raskar, head of the Camera Culture group at the MIT Media Lab and one of the team behind the system said "It's like having X-ray vision without the X-rays."
The applications of this camera are far- reaching if enhanced. Raskar says that the camera has use in search and rescue, robot vision and medical imagery.
He says, "You could generate a map before you go into a dangerous place like a building fire, or a robotic car could use the system to compute the path it should take around a corner before it takes it."
The research indeed is interesting but it is not clear what complexities of the invisible scenes can be computed at this point as the team has not shown the recovery of an entire hidden scene yet.
But the unstoppable team from MIT does not plan to just sit back and bask in the glory of this invention. Their current aim is to use this system to build an advanced endoscope; which if successful could come out in 2 years time.
All the applications intended to be performed by this camera are brilliant indeed but let us hope that an instrument as powerful as this does not end up in the hands of stalkers!
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