Femto Photography: Capturing the Unseen World

[jobyts]

Posting here, I think someone here would be interested in this:

 

[Greg Bernhardt]

Really neat stuff! What do our community photographers think? @Andy Resnick

 

[Andy Resnick]

It's interesting, to be sure- but it's not going to be commercially available anytime soon. Here's a link to the Nature paper, it has a diagram of their imaging system in Figure 1:

http://www.nature.com/articles/ncom...yUQNOf8pUJi5&tracking_referrer=www.nature.com

The actual hardware technology is nothing new- femtosecond lasers and streak cameras have been around for decades- people have been imaging propagating light pulses since the 1970s:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/20111288

What is significantly new is the computational power to reconstruct photon-sparse image sets; similar approaches are used in microscopy (STORM is the most common form, https://www.microscopyu.com/articles/superresolution/stormintro.html).

More broadly, the ways motion (time-varying position) can be represented in a single image lead to interesting effects:

http://people.rit.edu/andpph/text-streak-strip-scanning-imaging-overview.html
http://www.sportsshooter.com/news/2043

And I can't the link, but there's a photographer who creates images of people jumping/moving through a pulsed light sheet- really cool stuff.

 

[phinds]

Amazing stuff with huge potential although certainly Andy has it right that this is not something we'll see commercially available any time soon.