A standard response to photographs of UFOs, ghosts and other unexplained phenomena is: “It’s just a reflection.” That may soon change. A new camera can remove that doubt by identifying and removing reflections from digital photographs.
The brains at MIT – specifically, researchers at MIT’s Media Lab – started with the idea that it might be possible to take multiple superfast shots of the same image which will show slight differences in the reflection that a computer could detect and remove. Ayush Bhandari, MIT PhD student and study author, said this is impossible.
You physically cannot make a camera that picks out multiple reflections. That would mean that you take time slices so fast that [the camera] actually starts to operate at the speed of light, which is technically impossible. So what’s the trick? We use the Fourier transform.
The what? In simple terms, the Fourier transform is a way to deconstruct a signal or function of time into the frequencies that make it up – in this case, amplitude and phase. This is a substantial improvement over using conventional light sensors which only measure a light’s intensity.
Being MIT geeks, Bhandari and his team created their reflection-removing camera by hacking a Microsoft Xbox Kinect – a camera for the Xbox 360. Being students at a university that doesn’t want to be sued, they then notified Microsoft Research, which helped with the project.
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