Bright spot for depth perception

A new depth-perception cameras which works in a similar way to the widespread Microsoft Kinect video gaming controller but which operates in bright light or outdoors had been developed by researchers from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) and the University of Toronto (UoT) .

The camera could be used in medicine, on shiny or mirrored structures and, because it consumes very small amounts of energy, on extraterrestrial exploration rovers.

Kinect cameras work by projecting a pattern onto their object and detecting the reflections; the processing equipment detects how long reflections take to return and how distorted they are, then use this information to determine how far away from the camera the reflections originated. This allows them to build up a 3D image of the object. But in bright illumination or outdoors, the reflections are ‘washed out’ by ambient light, reducing the accuracy of the system.

Srinivasa Narasimhan of CMU and Kyros Kutulakos of UoT, respectively robotics and computer science researchers, devised a system that combines a laser projector with a rolling-shutter camera — the type of camera commonly used in smartphones — which detects only the laser light as it illuminates the object, rather than the light generally reflected.