Experts: the future of cameras mobile phones can use lasers to see through walls

According to DailyMail, on January 25, Experts said that: the camera’s perspective function is to use the principle of laser penetration. Use a laser to send a short light pulse to the ground beyond the edge of the wall.

When the laser hits the ground, the light is reflected in all directions, propagating like a “big growing sphere,” and the light ball travels through the wall to the hidden object. Then the light is reflected back from the hidden object like an echo, forming an image. Researchers can also learn the distance of an object by measuring the time required for the laser echo to return to the camera.

The Conversation article mentions Daniele Faccio, a professor of quantum technology at Glasgow University, and Stephen McLaughlin, dean of the College of Engineering and Physical Sciences at Heriot Watts, who think that the power of fluoroscopy will lead to a much larger revolution in camera technology. But in fact, smartphones that recognize face shapes and shoot slow-motion video at super-high resolution are already the beginning of this revolution. At present, the research direction of the camera is changing from adding megapixels to calculating and processing the fusion data.

HOW COULD FUTURE CAMERAS SEE BEHIND WALLS?

The latest camera research is shifting away from increasing the number of mega-pixels towards fusing camera data with computational processing.

This is a radical new approach where the incoming data may not actually look like at an image at all.

Soon, we could be able to do incredible things, like see through fog, inside the human body and even behind walls.

Researchers at Heriot-Watt University have released a video demonstrating a way to visualise objects hidden behind corners as follows:

1. A laser is used to send short pulses of light to the floor, just beyond the edge of the wall.
2. When the laser hits the floor, light is sent in every direction and travels like a ‘big growing sphere.’
3. That sphere of light travels behind the wall to reach a hiding objects
4. The light then bounces off the hidden object much like an echo and is sent back to where it came from.
5. A very sensitive camera (developed by researchers at the University of Edinburgh) that can detect even single photons is used to record a movie of the laser echo as it’s coming back, with a frame rate of 20 billion frames per second.
6. With the movie recorded in laboratory conditions and using this ultra-fast, ultra-sensitive camera, it is possible to pinpoint the hidden object’s position.
7. By measuring the time it takes for the laser echo to return to the camera, researchers know how far away the object is.

So this revolution no longer refers to adding effects and filters to pictures as they are in Photoshop, but rather processing incoming data that becomes imaged after a series of computational steps. These steps usually involve complex mathematical operations and simulations of how light travels in the scene or camera. The future, we may no longer need the traditional camera, replaced by imaging light detector, it can be through the fog, the human body, and even the wall.

Of course, these new technologies still need some research and development before they can be applied to real life. But what we can be sure of is that the camera revolution has begun.