Using smartphone cameras, system for seeing around corners could help with self-driving cars and search-and-rescue.
Light lets us see the things that surround us, but what if we could also use it to see things hidden around corners?
It sounds like science fiction, but that’s the idea behind a new algorithm out of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) — and its discovery has implications for everything from emergency response to self-driving cars.
The CSAIL team’s imaging system, which can work with smartphone cameras, uses information about light reflections to detect objects or people in a hidden scene and measure their speed and trajectory — all in real-time.
For more information on DARPA”s Revolutionary Enhancement of Visibility by Exploiting Active Light-fields (REVEAL) program, visit https://www.darpa.mil/program/revolutionary-enhancement-of-visibility-by-exploiting-active-light-fields.