They invent an innovative laser camera that you see behind the corners

Scientists at the MIT Media Lab have built a camera that can see objects located just around the corner and beyond the line of sight by reconstructing the hidden element using scattered laser light.. The camera uses light that travels from the object to the camera indirectly, by reflecting on walls or other obstacles, to reconstruct the shape in 3D.

At the technological institute MIT Media Lab have created an ultra-fast camera that allows you to see what's around the corner without even peeking. The secret of this technique is the speed of the camera, that can capture in a matter of femtoseconds (billionths of a second) photons scattered after impact against the background wall, once they have bounced off the object hidden behind the wall that hides it. To achieve such an achievement, the camera incorporates a laser beam cannon. This skill will be very useful to access dangerous locations such as burning premises, or inaccessible such as inside machines with moving parts or heavily contaminated areas.

In the background, the principle is the same as the echo. We all know that sound creates echoes by bouncing off walls., but the fact is that light also acts in a similar way. A normal camera sees only objects that are right in front. The light that reaches the lens from other lines of sight is too diffuse to carry useful information about hidden scenes., since it has been blurred after multiple refractions. However, the camera presented by MIT overcomes this problem by capturing ultrafast light information and decoding it using a reconstruction algorithm conceived by researcher Andreas Velten.

To be able to take images similar to the hidden object, the laser fires several beams against different points on the back wall, thus managing to calculate in a three-dimensional way a silhouette very close to the real object hidden around the corner. The ultra-fast camera designed by MIT takes advantage of this phenomenon to reach where the eyes do not reach, capturing images every time 2 Ps, which is the period of time that takes the light to travel alone 0,6 Mm. Thanks to this it is possible to calculate the distance traveled by each photon with submillimeter precision.

What is really slow is the process of selecting the photons that carry valuable information., of those arriving from elsewhere in the same time period. In fact, to make the image of the hidden object the system requires several minutes. Keep in mind that to trace each object it is necessary to make several laser shots. However, researchers hope that in the future, the entire process can be reduced to take just 10 Seconds.

[Youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JWDocXPy-iQ[/Youtube]

Other articles on MIT Media Lab