Applications include imaging man-made targets such as moving
vehicles
A standard camera takes flat, 2-D pictures. To get 3-D
information, such as the distance to a far-away object, scientists can bounce a
laser beam off the object and measure how long it takes the light to travel
back to a detector. The technique, called time-of-flight (ToF), is already used
in machine vision, navigation systems for autonomous vehicles, and other
applications, but many current ToF systems have a relatively short range and
struggle to image objects that do not reflect laser light well. A team of
Scotland-based physicists has recently tackled these limitations and reported
their findings today in the Optical Society's (OSA) open-access journal Optics
Express.
The research team, led by Gerald Buller, a professor at
Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh, Scotland, describes a ToF imaging system
that can gather high-resolution, 3-D information about objects that are
typically very difficult to image, from up to a kilometer away.