In 1964 MIT professor Harold
Edgerton, pioneer of stop-action photography, famously took a photo of a bullet
piercing an apple using exposures as short as a few nanoseconds. Inspired by
his work, Ramesh Raskar and his team set out to create a camera that could
capture not just a bullet (traveling at 850 meters per second) but light itself
(nearly 300 million meters per second).
Ramesh Raskar joined the Media Lab
from Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories in 2008 as head of the Lab's
Camera Culture research group. His research interests span the fields of
computational photography, inverse problems in imaging, and human-computer
interaction. Recent inventions include transient imagingto look around a
corner, a next-generation CAT-scan machine, imperceptible markers for motion
capture (Prakash), long-distance barcodes (Bokode), touch + hover 3D
interaction displays (BiDi screen), low-cost eye care devices (NETRA) and new
theoretical models to augment light fields (ALF) to represent wave phenomena.
Here he presents femto-photography, a
new type of imaging so fast it visualizes the world one trillion frames per
second, so detailed it shows light itself in motion. This technology may
someday be used to build cameras that can look round corners or see inside
the body without X-rays.
Photography is about creating images
by recording light. At the MIT media lab, professor Ramesh Raskar and his team
members have invented a camera that can photograph light itself as it moves at,
well, the speed of light
Ramesh Raskar qualified as an
engineer from the Govt College of Engineering, Pune, India. Did his M.S. Computer Science at the University of Iowa and obtained his Ph.D in Computer
Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
http://femtocamera.info
