from Hacker News

The New Science of Seeing Around Corners

by tonybeltramelli on 9/3/18, 12:25 PM with 10 comments

  • by yosito on 9/4/18, 1:50 AM

    I'd love to see some examples of these reconstructed images. Especially ones that come from photos that were taken before this technology was developed. This work reminds me of a technology I read about a few years ago that could determine an actor's heart rate from movie footage. There's so much hidden information in the recordings that we make, if we can figure out how to extract it.

  • by alister on 9/3/18, 11:09 PM

    This reminds me of the scene from the remarkably prescient original Blade Runner (1982) where Deckard is able to look around corners in a photograph -- he tells the computer to "pull out, track right, track 45 right, enhance,..."[1] and finds a woman that wasn't visible at first.

    [1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0083658/quotes

    EDIT: Rereading the quotes from the script, it seems like Deckard was using the reflection from a mirror to look into another room. However, in the movie it felt like he was going around a corner to get to the mirror.

  • by DoctorOetker on 9/4/18, 9:00 PM

    I wonder if the pin-speck technique could be used to reconstruct a 3d reconstruction of the Chelyanbinsk meteor:

    1) There were huge amounts of recordings

    2) It generated plenty of clear shadows (and presumable sun-shadows can be recovered as well)

    3) For high intensity images, many cameras might decrease shutterspeed frame by frame, so each line is sampling a shorter period, thus a collection of cameras can be considered to perform random oversampling at a higher framerate (as some oscilloscopes do when not in single-shot mode)

    4) The recordings are taken from many vantage points in a wide region, potentially allowing a 3d reconstruction of the meteor as it breaks up

  • by uptown on 9/4/18, 2:17 AM

    First heard this concept mentioned at SIGGRAPH in 2005 as “dual photography”. Here’s the paper:

    https://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/dual_photography/

  • by sidigrid on 9/4/18, 2:54 AM

    Wasn't there a Ted talk long back where a research team presented a camera that could do this? Creating images by looking around the corner?