Femto-photography (Capturing exposures at one trillion fps)

[Strittan]

Femto-photography is a term describing ultra high speed imaging. Femto-photography of macroscopic objects was first done by a team at the MIT Media Lab lead by Ramesh Raskar. Before that the term has at least been used for certain proposed experimental procedures in experimental nuclear physics.

In their publications Raskar's team claims to be able to capture exposures so short that light only traverses 0.6 mm (Equal to only a few picoseconds, or thousands of femtoseconds) during one exposure by combining available high end research equipment and sophisticated sampling algorithms. Raskar presented his teams feat during TEDGlobal 2012, reaching a wider audience through viral video.

In his demonstration, He shows a 1mm wide light "bullet", created by flashing a laser for one trillionth of a second, passing through a bottle in darkness. As the beam of light hits the other end of the bottle, the photons disperse and ripple through the entire body before exploding upon contact with the cap. The whole phenomenon takes place in less than a nanosecond.

The femto-photography technique allowed Raskar's team to, among other things, show the path of a packet of light traversing a coca cola bottle, and to image an object hidden behind a corner by reconstruction of individual photon reflection paths.

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I found this video yesterday, and boy is it fascinating or what? These guys has managed to capture the way light(!) travels and reacts to other objects.

 

[AOS-]

Saw this a few months ago

 

[TB]

^ As did I but I fail to see how that is even remotely amusing.

I still don't fully understand exactly how they get an image with frame rates like that but the results are indeed truly stunning. 👍

 

[Slash]

Yup saw it too

 

[Bye Ya]

"Slowing down by a factor of 10 billion." Awesome.

 

[SlipZtrEm]

I still don't fully understand exactly how they get an image with frame rates like that but the results are indeed truly stunning. 👍

It sounds to me, basically, as HDR taken to extreme lengths. That's the impression I got when he talked about compiling all the data, at any rate. They do the test they're showing us with the "light bullet" thousands of times, and with the aid of some (apparently) mighty advanced synchronization, match the right frames together from each test to produce what we see. That's how I took it

Truly awe-inspiring 👍

 

[photonrider]

It's a bird! It's a plane! No wait! It's a particle! It's a wave! No! It's photons!

I like his final words. It's really about time.