MIT LiDAR Breakthrough: Everyday Sensors Now See around Corners
Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers are pushing consumer LiDAR from a depth sensor to a way to peek behind obstacles, which could be a huge boon for robotics, logistics, and even gaming.
The new work published in the Nature journal argues that a smartphone-grade LiDAR can "see" hidden objects that are reconstructed from the faint light that bounces off nearby surfaces and returned to the sensor. The team’s motion-induced aperture sampling model unifies object shape, object motion, and camera motion in one framework, which lets the system extract useful signals from scenes that would otherwise look like noise.
Years ago, MIT’s corner-seeing camera had to rely on lasers and picosecond timing to reconstruct geometry from scattered light, proving that indirect light could be decoded into a usable image. The newer MIT Media Lab approach described this time is much more practical: it uses everyday smartphone LiDAR hardware and computational...
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