Revolutionary Enhancement of Visibility: Exploiting Active Light-Fields (REVEAL)

darpa.mil

26 points·bookofjoe··5 comments

An update on the program: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2018/09/non-l...

A slightly more in-depth PR about this program is also available on the DARPA web site:

https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2015-05-22

Presumably "active light" means "we flash some light source, possibly invisible to the naked eye, and see what comes back" and this enables some of that transit-time type of statistics that they are trying to collect? So assuming one color at a time, you would get a time-series of images, a sort of 3D model of your normally-2D image. By collecting both polarizations separately and flashing a polarized light source you would get two independent 3D models of the light's propagation through a room.

It seems to be a basic research program asking the question "what if we capture light properties in other ways than time-aggregated photon intensities on a pixel raster behind some color filter" and build both theory and lab experiments to find answers to that question.

So they're casting a wide net that could cover polarization, transit-time, hyperspectral imaging or phase information.

See these multiple independent MIT research results (which happen to be mentioned in an Atlantic article linked to by another commenter):

http://people.csail.mit.edu/klbouman/cornercameras.html http://web.media.mit.edu/~raskar/trillionfps/ http://openaccess.thecvf.com/content_cvpr_2018/papers/Barada... http://people.csail.mit.edu/torralba/research/accidentalcame...

Part of that first paragraph seems like it contains a direct paraphrasing of what I once wrote at https://hackaday.com/2015/01/25/hackaday-links-january-25-20...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com