Nothing says James Bond technology like the ability to take photographs in a completely dark room. Now there's a camera at MIT that can do just that.
The 'First-Photon Imager' camera developed by MIT researchers takes pictures in near total darkness by reconstructing 3D images from photons, or single particles of light that are reflected from an object.
Ordinarily, cameras shooting in low-light settings require tens or hundreds of photons per pixel to take a high resolution photo. Normal cameras taking photos in brighter settings need trillions of photons.
The new camera technology, developed by Ahmed Kirmani of MIT, needs only one photon per pixel.
"Our camera is a computational imager that works by repeatedly illuminating the scene with pulses of light, and by detecting the first photon arrival at each pixel," Kirmani told Mashable in an email.
"The time-of-arrival data associated with the first photon detections is computationally processed using our new signal processing algorithms to form 3D and reflectivity images."
The camera fires a laser with pulses of light towards an object in low-light conditions. Then a photon detector records a single reflected photon. Imaging algorithms in the software then produce high-resolution images.
The laser and detector are not new; they're similar to the LIDAR system used by Google Street View. It is the MIT team's algorithm that's the real breakthrough here. The process is further explained in the team's research paper on Science AAAS.
The so-called First-Photon Imager camera may not be on the market any time soon; it seems likely to be used for intelligence or military purposes first. It could also help examine any kind of physical, chemical or biological specimens that would be destroyed in bright light.
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