Smartphone Cameras Peek Around Corners by Analyzing Patterns of Light

Magically seeing around corners to spot moving people or objects may not rank first in most people's superhero daydreams. But MIT researchers have shown how they could someday bestow that superpower upon anyone with a smartphone. Their secret to peeking around corners is detecting slight differences in light patterns reflected from moving objects or people. Those reflected light patterns form subtle variations in the shadowy area near the base of each corner. MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) created simple software that can detect fuzzy pattern variations in the pixels of a 2-D video--taken by a basic consumer camera or even a smartphone camera--and reconstruct the speed and trajectory of moving objects by stitching together multiple, distinct 1-D images.