Being able to see inside a locked room was a skill reserved for superheroes. But researchers at the Stanford Computational Imaging Laboratory they have been enlarged in a technique called image without line of sight so that only single point of laser light entering the room can be used to see what physical objects may be inside.
Images without a line of sight (NLOS, in short) are by no means a new idea. It is a smart technique that has been perfected over the years in research laboratories to create cameras that can see noticeably in the corners i generate images of objects which are otherwise not in the field of view of the camera or are blocked by a series of obstacles. Previously, the technique has taken advantage of flat surfaces such as floors or walls that are in the line of sight of the camera and the obstructed object. A series of pulses of light from the camera, usually from lasers, bounce off these surfaces and then bounce off the hidden object before returning to the camera sensors. Algorithms use information about how long these reflections have taken to re-generate an image of what the camera cannot see. The results are not high resolution, but are usually detailed enough to easily determine which object is in question.
It is an incredibly clever technique and could one day be a very useful technology for devices such as autonomous cars that could potentially detect potential dangers hidden in the corners long before they are visible to passengers in a vehicle, improving safety and avoiding obstacles. . But current NLOS techniques have one major limitation: they rely on a large reflecting surface where light reflections from a hidden object can be measured. Trying to imagine what’s inside a locked room from the outside is almost impossible, either at least it was Bye now.
The keyhole imaging technique, developed by researchers at Stanford University’s Computational Imaging Laboratory, is so called because all it takes to see what’s inside a locked room is a small hole (such as a keyhole or a mirror) large enough to shine a laser beam, creating a single point of light on the interior wall. As with previous experiments, the laser light bounces against a wall, an object in the room and then back against the wall, with countless photons that are finally reflected through the hole and into the camera using a photodetector. avalanche of a single photon to measure the time of its return.
When an object hidden in the room is static, the new keyhole imaging technique simply cannot calculate what it is seeing. But researchers have found that a moving object paired with pulses of light from a laser generates enough useful data over a long period of exposure time for an algorithm to create an image of what it is seeing. The quality of the results is even worse than with previous NLOS techniques, but it still provides enough detail to make a polite assumption about the size and shape of the hidden object. A wooden mannequin ends up looking like a ghostly angel, but when combined with a properly trained image recognition AI, determining that a human (or human-shaped object) was in the room seems very feasible.
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The investigation could one day provide a path for the police or the military to assess the risks of entering a room before breaking down the door and entering the entrance without using any small cracks in the wall or a gap around a window or portal. The new technique could also provide new techniques for autonomous navigation systems to detect hidden dangers long before they became a threat in situations where previous NLOS techniques were not practical given the environment.