Optics

Researchers have developed a compact and lightweight single-photon airborne lidar system that can acquire high-resolution 3D images with a low-power laser. This advance could make single-photon lidar practical for air and space applications such as environmental monitoring, 3D terrain mapping and object identification. Single-photon lidar uses single-photon detection techniques to measure the time it takes ...

Researchers have developed a new technology that uses meta-optical devices to perform thermal imaging. The approach provides richer information about imaged objects, which could broaden the use of thermal imaging in fields such as autonomous navigation, security, thermography, medical imaging and remote sensing. “Our method overcomes the challenges of traditional spectral thermal imagers, which are ...

Devices that move and operate in physical space need sensors to read their environment. One such sensing technology, LiDAR, has many potential applications, but is often too large or too expensive to be a viable choice. Now, a team of researchers at University of Washington has developed a much smaller and less costly form of ...

UCLA researchers led by Aydogan Ozcan and Mona Jarrahi have developed a multispectral imaging technology capable of turning a monochrome sensor into a multispectral one. Rather than the traditional absorptive filters used for multispectral imaging, the technology uses a diffractive optical network to form 16 unique spectral bands periodically repeating at the output image field ...

»Wenn man von der Kälte in einen warmen Raum kommt, kann die Brille beschlagen und somit die Sicht des Brillenträgers stark einschränken«, sagt Anne Gärtner. »Das Gleiche kann auch bei Sensoren wie den LiDAR-Systemen in autonom fahrenden Autos passieren. Hier ist es wichtig, dass die Oberflächen auch bei Beschlag hochtransparent bleiben, damit die Funktionalität erhalten ...

Researchers have shown that a quantum-inspired technique can be used to perform LiDAR imaging with a much higher depth resolution than is possible with conventional approaches. LiDAR, which uses laser pulses to acquire 3D information about a scene or object, is usually best suited for imaging large objects such as topographical features or built structures ...