Indian develops a camera than can illuminate objects around corners and scan a closed book
Ramesh Raskar has literally given humans super-human vision that allow cameras that can illuminate objects hidden around corners and read the pages in a closed book.
Raskar, an associate professor of media arts and sciences at MIT and head of the MIT Media Lab's Camera Culture Group, has developed atechnique called femto-photography, basically using a camera and software to visualise the propagation of light at about half a trillion frames per second. Yup, you didn't read that wrong! Its faster that a blink of the eye.
Another technique Raskar and his colleagues developed is reading individual pages in a closed book. Their prototype system extracts and localises single pages through special time-gated terahertz spectral analysis. It accurately picked up terahertz radiation signals from the paper and filtered out the noise to show letters on the first nine pages in a stack, MIT News reported. As a result of his outsatnding owrk, Raskar won the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT Prize that honours outstanding mid-career inventors. Watch him explain his creations below:
He envisions his research helping people drive safely through fog, detecting tumor cells in a non-invasive way and reading rare books. He told the Lemelson-MIT program he was surprised to learn that 90 percent of book archives are too fragile to be shared with the public. "Our research can only scan first 9 pages," he said. "But fundamentally, there is nothing stopping anyone else to build on top of our solution to penetrate deeper into more pages."
