When we talk about autonomous vehicles, we often say how great it would be if they could
see as well as humans.
But what if we could make imaging technology that sees BETTER than humans?
A team from Stanford may have done just that—they’ve now developed a camera that
can see around corners.
Ok, but...how?
For starters, this kind of technology is called non-line-of-sight imaging, because the object
or scene of interest is outside the camera’s direct line of sight.
These kinds of cameras use lasers to accomplish this seemingly impossible task, firing the
laser at a wall opposite the object of interest.
The light scatters off the wall, and reflects off the object hidden around the corner and
back onto the wall.
Sensors, paired with a processing algorithm, measure how long it takes for this scattered
light to return to the wall, and using those measurements, the system can accurately reconstruct
an image of what’s hiding around the corner.
And the cherry on top of the light-reflected cake here is that this latest system can do
this in real time.
See, there are some previously developed set-ups that are capable of reconstructing images
of objects that are hidden from view.
Light-cone transform systems, for example, were demonstrated just last year by the same
team to be able to ‘see’ around corners.
But the problem with those previous methods is that they’re rather slow.
It takes a long time to measure and reconstruct the image—not exactly ideal for real-time
driving feedback.
Light-cone transform and other previous non-line-of-sight imaging techniques also rely on objects that
reflect light strongly and evenly.
This is an idealized situation that we’re not going to encounter much in the real world
with dark conditions, shiny moving cars, and pedestrians wearing non high-vis clothing.
But this new system may have just changed all that.
You can see here that one of the main researchers got to dress up in a funny suit and goof off
as the ‘around the corner guy’, and that the image moves with him, with the camera
able to update the image reconstruction as he goes!
They were able to make these improvements in time efficiency, plus the system’s ability
to detect a much wider variety of objects that reflect light in more complex ways,
because of improvements both to the laser and in imaging reconstruction techniques.
The laser in this new system is 10,000 times more powerful than the one used in their experiments
from last year.
They also took a new approach to image reconstruction, using an existing technique called f-k migration,
which is more efficient at using the light data to calculate the position of the hidden object
f-K migration is also less sensitive to ‘noise’, giving us a cleaner picture of the object
in question.
The team took inspiration for their system advancements from a few other scientific fields,
like imaging satellites and seismology.
Scientists who study the Earth’s interior do something similar by using shock waves
that propagate down into the mantle, and measuring what bounces back.
This gives them a picture of what’s down there, like a seismic imprint of structures
lurking under the Earth’s surface.
It may seem most obvious that systems like this would be super helpful in applications
like making self-driving cars better—not only better than they currently are, but also
eventually better than humans are at making decisions based on our surroundings.
But this technology could also improve a whole range of other fields too, like robotics—helping
rovers see around objects on other planets to help them navigate and avoid hazards to
stay operational—and even in medical imaging, to help us see through some tissues.
But before all that can happen, the team still wants to make their tech better.
They need to even further improve the system’s speed, the clarity and fidelity of the image,
as well as its ability to function in more difficult conditions, like fog and rain.
But judging by the improvements they’ve already made in just a year, this team will certainly keep
innovating, and this is already such a cool look at what exciting future might be hiding
just around the corner.
If you want more exciting tech news, check out this video over here, and
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Thanks so much for watching and as always, I’ll see you next time.