Science Daily January 16, 2020 A team of researchers in the US (Stanford University, Princeton University, Southern Methodist University, Rice University) developed an imaging system which uses a commercially available camera sensor and a powerful laser source that is similar to the one found in a laser pointer. The laser beam bounces off a visible wall onto the hidden object and then back onto the wall, creating a speckle pattern that encodes the shape of the hidden object. It can distinguish submillimeter details of a hidden object from 1 meter away. The system can be combined with other imaging systems […]
Category Archives: Imaging technology
Ultrafast camera takes 1 trillion frames per second of transparent objects and phenomena
Phys.org January 20, 2020 Researchers at Caltech have developed a new imaging system, phase-sensitive compressed ultrafast photography (pCUP), that combines with phase-contrast microscopy, that was designed to allow better imaging of objects that are mostly transparent such as cells. They adapted the standard phase-contrast microscopy so that it provides very fast imaging. The system consists of lossless encoding compressed ultrafast technology (LLE-CUP) which takes a single shot, capturing all the motion that occurs during the time that shot takes to complete. LLE-CUP is capable of capturing motion, such as the movement of light itself. They demonstrated the capabilities of pCUP […]
Researchers capture moving object with ghost imaging
Science Daily November 13, 2019 Ghost imaging has been limited to stationary objects because it takes a long time to project the sequence of light patterns onto the object that is necessary to reconstruct an image making blurry. The ghost imaging technique forms an image by correlating a beam that interacts with the object and a reference beam that does not interact with te object. Individually, the beams don’t carry any meaningful information about the object. To apply ghost imaging to moving objects researchers in China used a small number of light patterns to capture the position and trajectory of […]
Extracting hidden quantum information from a light source
Phys.org October 24, 2019 An international team of researchers (UK, USA – Princeton University) experimentally demonstrated the distillation of a quantum image from measured data composed of a superposition of both quantum and classical light. They measured the image of an object formed under quantum illumination that is mixed with another image produced by classical light with the same spectrum and polarization, and demonstrated near-perfect separation of the two superimposed images by intensity correlation measurements. This work provides a method to mix and distinguish information carried by quantum and classical light, which may be useful for quantum imaging, communications, and […]
New chip poised to enable hand-held microwave imaging
Science Daily September 26, 2019 Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania used a standard semiconductor fabrication process to make a microwave imager chip, measuring just over 2 millimeters on each side, containing more than 1,000 photonic components. The imager uses four antennas to receive microwave signals reflected from an object. The microwave signals are then encoded into an optical signal and are optically processed to form an image. To demonstrate the new chip, the researchers used it to image objects with metallic surfaces. The system is significantly smaller and more efficient than its electronic equivalent and can operate with significantly […]
Nanowires replace Newton’s famous glass prism
Phys.org September 5, 2019 An international team of researchers (UK, China) used a nanowire whose material composition is varied along its length, enabling it to be responsive to different colours of light across the visible spectrum. They created a series of light-responsive sections on this nanowire. Individual responses from the nanowire sections can then be directly fed into a computer algorithm to reconstruct the incident light spectrum. Every pixel of the device contains data points from across the visible spectrum, providing detailed information. This can tell us, for instance, about chemical processes occurring in the frame of the image. One […]
Lessons of conventional imaging let scientists see around corners
Science Daily August 5, 2019 An international team of researchers (USA – University of Wisconsin, Spain) shows that the problem of non-line-of-sight imaging can also be formulated as one of diffractive wave propagation, by introducing a virtual wave field that they call the phasor field. Their method yields a new class of imaging algorithms that mimic the capabilities of line-of-sight cameras. They demonstrated non-line-of-sight imaging of complex scenes with strong multiple scattering and ambient light, arbitrary materials, large depth range and occlusions. Their method handles these challenging cases without explicitly inverting a light-transport model. Once perfected, it could be used […]
Camera can watch moving objects around corners
Science Daily July 29, 2019 A team of researchers in the US (Stanford University, Carnegie Mellon University) builds upon previous around-the-corner cameras they developed. It is able to capture more light from a greater variety of surfaces, see wider and farther away and is fast enough to monitor out-of-sight movement. The powerful laser scans a wall opposite the scene of interest and that light bounces off the wall, hits the objects in the scene, bounces back to the wall and to the camera sensors. By the time the laser light reaches the camera only specks remain, but the sensor captures […]
Recovering color images from scattered light
EurekAlert July 29, 2019 Researchers at Duke University used a coded aperture, which acts as a filter that allows light to pass through some areas but not others in a specific pattern, followed by a prism. After the speckle is “stamped” by the coded aperture, it passes through a prism that causes different frequencies of light to spread out from each other. The pattern from the coded aperture shifts slightly in relation to the image being captured by the detector; the amount it shifts is directly related to the color of light passing through. They developed an algorithm that teases […]
Researchers see around corners to detect object shapes
EurekAlert June 19, 2019 An international team of researchers (USA – Carnegie Mellon University, Canada, UK) demonstrated they can use special light sources and sensors to see around corners or through gauzy filters, enabling them to reconstruct the shapes of unseen objects. They have computed millimeter- and micrometer-scale shapes of curved objects, providing an important new component to a larger suite of non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging techniques now being developed by computer vision researchers. Research will be presented at an upcoming conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition…read more.