New camera sees through fog to make driving safer

MIT researchers, including those of Indian-origin, have developed a new camera that sees through fog and can make driving safer.
The USD 500 'nano-camera' that can operate at the speed of light has been developed by researchers in the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab.
The camera is based on "Time of Flight" technology in which the location of objects is calculated by how long it takes a light signal to reflect off a surface and return to the sensor.
However, unlike existing devices based on this technology, the new camera is not fooled by rain, fog, or even translucent objects, said co-author Achuta Kadambi.

"Using the current state of the art, such as the new Kinect, you cannot capture translucent objects in 3-D," said Kadambi, a graduate student at MIT.
"That is because the light that bounces off the transparent object and the background smear into one pixel on the camera. Using our technique you can generate 3-D models of translucent or near-transparent objects," Kadambi added.

In a conventional Time of Flight camera, a light signal is fired at a scene, where it bounces off an object and returns to strike the pixel.
Since the speed of light is known, it is simple for the camera to calculate the distance the signal has travelled and therefore the depth of the object it has been reflected from.

The new device uses an encoding technique commonly used in the telecommunications industry to calculate the distance a signal has travelled, said Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor of media arts and sciences.
Raskar was the leader of the Camera Culture group within the Media Lab, which developed the method alongside Kadambi, Refael Whyte, Ayush Bhandari, and Christopher Barsi at MIT and Adrian Dorrington and Lee Streeter from the University of Waikato in New Zealand.