The United States develops new technology to realize a new camera that can observe objects through scattered light

According to foreign media reports, engineers at Rice University and the University of Maryland have developed a full-motion video technology that may be used to create new cameras that can help cameras penetrate fog, smoke, heavy rain, turbid water, skin, bones and other reflections Observe the environment through media that scatter light and block objects.

NeuWS technology experiment (Image source: Rice University)

Ashok Veeraraghavan of Rice University said: "In optical imaging, imaging through scattering media is a "Holy Grail problem" (a problem that everyone wants to solve). Scattering will make the light unusable in many cases because the wavelength of the light will be lower. , leading to higher spatial resolution, imaging can be developed better if the effect of scattering can be eliminated."

Veeraraghavan's lab collaborated with Christopher Metzler's research group at the University of Maryland to create a technology called NeuWS (neural wavefront shaping), which is also the key to this technology.

“The biggest challenge for people working on self-driving cars is bad weather,” Veeraraghavan said. “You can’t do good imaging in bad weather. The technical term for bad weather is light scattering. For biology For scientists, the biggest challenge with microscopes is their inability to image deep tissue in living bodies. When we talk about "deep tissue" and "living tissue," we actually want to see through skin and other tissue layers, because these scatter light. Ask underwater videographers what their biggest challenge is and they'll say, I can only image things that are close to me. What they really mean is that light scatters in the water, so it can't penetrate far enough into the water to focus on distant objects. The real technical problem in all of this is light scattering."

Veeraraghavan points out that NeuWS can be used to overcome the light scattering problem that arises in these situations. "We've taken a big step forward in terms of actually solving this problem. There's still a lot of work to be done before we can actually build prototypes in the application areas mentioned above, but the approach we've shown covers those areas."

Conceptually, NeuWS is based on the complex mathematics of two key properties of light waves that can be calculated at any given location. The first is the amplitude, which is the energy carried by the wave at that location; the second is the phase, which is the oscillation state of the wave at that location. Metzler and Veeraraghavan say measuring phase is critical to overcoming scattering, but because of the high-frequency nature of visible light, directly measuring phase is impractical.