Tom 7 Radar: dual photography

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dual photography (10 May 2005 at 14:54)

This is an awesome paper (as seen on slashdot). The basic idea is that since light transport is reversible, you can perform the following experiment:

* Set up a scene * Aim a projector at it ("light source") from a fixed location A * Take a number of pictures of the scene from a fixed location B, under different lighting conditions generated by the projector * perform a calculation on this set of images that allows you to view the scene from the location of the light source.

The best part is the final page of the paper, where they reconstruct a fairly high resolution image of the obverse of a playing card from 5,000 pictures of its reverse (and a nearby book) under different lighting conditions. World series of poker, here we come!

http://graphics.stanford.edu/papers/dual_photography/

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jcreed (wittgenstein.wv.cc.cmu.edu) – 05.10.05 18:12:36

Sweet.

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jcreed (wittgenstein.wv.cc.cmu.edu) – 05.10.05 18:14:10

Yeah, I like how the essential thing for the obverse of the card being visible is the following condition: if the camera were the light source, there are enough big white objects around (like the book) to reflect enough light onto the card face. What a crazy duality!

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Hock (res211.mesls.org) – 05.11.05 02:01:13

Really neat... but the uses for it seem pretty technical.

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