You may not see what’s around the corner — unless you have an advanced camera designed by researchers at Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland. This device is designed to take high resolution photographs that is able to detect small reflected lights off objects beyond its field of vision. The resulting product is a camera that sees round corners in real time.
The single-photon avalanche diode (SPAD) camera depends on a type of echo mapping. You can refer to it as a radar, but with light. This part is not something new — other projects have managed to do similar things.This camera is very sensitive that it can snap photos every second. So,you can observe an object moving using the SPAD camera even when it’s physically out of sight.
To facilitate this, the researchers used a laser ranging technology to produce photons.The laser pulse generated is fired at a surface beyond the corner similar in direction to where the camera faces. When it strikes the surface,the light is reflected in all directions. The camera catches this propagation of photons, then it waits for a response — an echo. The wave will eventually strike the out of site object and reflect back, but feebly. The laser is especially fast,firing as much as 67 million times per second. This streams a lot of information into the camera since it can detect a single photon passing through its field of vision.
You may not have a photo-realistic rendering of the out of site object, but the SPAD does reveal plenty of data. The photons received by the camera may be used to calculate the size, speed, and location of the object approximate to a centimeter or two. It may even manage to identify multiple objects based on the scattering of photons.
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