Those guys at Stanford must be watching a lot of James Bond movies. Their latest invention is a laser that can image an entire room through a keyhole. We imagine that will show up in a number of spy movies real soon now. You can see the code or watch the video below.
The technique is called NLOS or non-line-of-sight imaging. Previous approaches require scanning a large area to find indirect light from hidden objects. This new approach uses a laser to find objects that are moving. The indirect data changes based on the movement and an algorithm can reverse the measurements to determine the characteristics of the object.
If you are worried about the neighborhood peeping Tom, you can probably relax. The recovered images are amazing, but not particularly high-quality. Still, considering they were made indirectly, they are great, but you are not going to make out fine details.
As you might expect, the work is computationally intensive. The GitHub repository has Python code as well as data you can use if you don’t want to build your own laser setup. You can use CUDA to speed up the computations if you have a GPU with enough memory.
NLOS imaging isn’t exactly new, but there are still new ways to do it waiting to be found. We love novel uses of lasers. We’ve seen laser logic gates. We still want to try the laser oven.
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