Lasers capture 3D images from a kilometre away It sounds like a privacy advocate's worst nightmare: fire an infrared laser, scan the object, get its time-of-flight, and you can create a 3D imaging system that works at up to a kilometre distance. It's not a completely new idea, of course. It is, in fact, quite close to how we use airborne LIDAR to get high-resolution …
Whilst it may work well for people standing in front of a perfectly flat wall, what happens if they are, as mentioned in the article, in "foliage"? or behind flyscreen? I imagine a system that gets a good reflection off clothing would also get some sort of reflection off fine mesh (although I'm happy to stand corrected). Also the dude's belt appears to be playing havoc with the reflections a bit, perhaps this is one occasion where a tinfoil hat may actually have a use?
The tech is extremely cool though.
You get a return from each object in the path, most LIDAR systems will give you all the depth values or just first/last hit.
The difficult bit about using them at this range is that the beam is a foot across unless you are carrying optics the size of a truck to project it, it looks like their software is doing some clever surface reconstruction maths to get pixels that small so it will be confused by anything fuzzy - it probably also needs the target to stand very still to allow it to build up the map
Er, when I was being taught by Gerald Buller, I wasn't at Edinburgh University, I was at Heriot-Watt University, and so was he!
(And he still is, according to http://www.eps.hw.ac.uk/institutes/photonics-quantum-sciences/gerald-buller.htm )
This system has been in development for decades. When I graduated in, er, 1998 they had a sub-millimetre accuracy demonstrator that was mind blowing as it took detailed pictures across the room, accurate in 3 dimensions.
"Yep, it's a human."
Yawn...
Lasers bolted to aircraft have been penetrating Central American jungle canopies, and discovering long lost structures, for at least several years. This seems to be along the same lines, but higher resolution and without all those pesky leaves in the way.
Is this a High School project? Did he get an 'A'?
I love how no one here seems to notice that black absorbs light and reflects utterly little, you'd probably be invisible on this thing if you were wearing black clothes, anything the camera would pick up (because there is of course no true black and far from good black clothing) could be called measurement error by the software / user, rendering you invisible ;)
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