Researchers have developed a new camera technique using synthetic aperture radar that they say can pinpoint fingerprints at a distance even with a short lens. A prototype of SAVI – for “Synthetic Apertures for long-range, subdiffraction-limited Visible Imaging” – has been built and tested by engineers at Rice and Northwestern universities.The device reads a spot illuminated by a laser and captures the “speckle” pattern with a camera sensor. The prototype only works with coherent illumination sources such as lasers, but Ashok Veeraraghavan, a Rice assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering, said it's a step toward a SAVI camera array for use in visible light.”Today, the technology can be applied only to coherent (laser) light,” he said. “That means you cannot apply these techniques to take pictures outdoors and improve resolution for sunlit images – as yet. Our hope is that one day, maybe a decade from now, we will have that ability.”Labs led by Veeraraghavan at Rice and Oliver Cossairt at Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering built and tested the device that compares interference patterns between multiple speckled images. Like the technique used to achieve the “Matrix” special effect, the images are taken from slightly different angles, but with one camera that is moved between shots instead of many fired in sequence.
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