January 7, 2015
Spying Through A Keyhole Goes High-Tech: Devices Use Lasers To Map An Entire Room Through A One-Inch Gap — Adds A Whole New Meaning To……Hide And Seek
I have written pretty exhaustively on how much surveillance we are under — practically constantly. Every app we download potentially is sending our location and preferences, likes, dislikes to retailers and others who can use big data-mining to do a composite sketch of daily lives. Then there are body-scans at airports, fingerprint authentication that can be stolen or copied off our mobile devices DNA-shedding, facial and iris recognition, the shapes and contours of our ears and veins our digital exhaust, and voice identification, and so on.
Now comes a report today, in London’s TheDailyMailOnline, by Ellie Zolfagharifard who writes, “looking through the keyhole could soon reveal far more than we imagine.” She adds that scientists have developed a device that could map an entire room — simply by shinning a laser through a 2cm gap. The system could be used in battlefield surveillance, firefighting, and disaster recovery operations;” but, would also add law enforcement and intelligence collection purposes.
‘The technology is the work of Harbin Institute of Technology in China; and, is based on a laser that can see around corners,” according to a report by Jacob Aron, at The New Scientist. “The system works by firing ultrafast laser pulses at walls ‘behind’ an area that can’t be seen, to capture a ghostly 3-D reflection. The technique is similar to using a mirror to see around a corner — but, instead of a mirror, the ‘reflection’ is reconstructed for laser light that scatters back off a wall. The camera ‘times’ the beams of light as they bounce back to its sensors; and, builds an image, which is slightly wobbly, but precise to ranges of just one centimeter,” Ms. Zolfaghanifard.
TheDailyMailOnline, adds that “the group’s latest project has built on this technology to measure the 3D shape and position of three cardboard letters , spelling HIT, through a 2cm hole in a wall. But, in this set up time,” the publication notes, “the light returning from the object through the hole and on to another wall, which then scatters light into the camera. However, the technique may not work as well in the real world [yet], in this study, the letters were coated in reflective material; and, the rest of the room was covered in black cloth.”
“Last year, British scientists used a similar technique to create a camera that can peer round corners without the aid of a mirror. By taking pictures at the speed of light, the device can reveal hidden objects — from people, to parked cars, to military tanks. The device, created by Jonathan Leach of Edinburgh’s Heriot-Watt University, is made of a laser, a super-fast camera which sits beside it, and a computer. To see something that is around a corner, the laser is pointed so that its light ricochets off a wall and onto the hidden object. Some of the light will automatically bounce back off the object and back onto the wall and a tiny fraction will go back towards the camera. The camera in the device takes 15B shots a second, making it fast enough to catch the reflected light. A computer then uses the amount of time the light spent traveling to the camera; and then the pattern of the reflections work out the shape of the object — and, how far away it is,,” Ms. Zolfaghanifard wrote.
Drones, identity management/biometrics, and now — cameras/lasers that can map an entire room through a 2cm keyhole. Adds a whole new meaning to hide and seek. V/R, RCP
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