The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency is set to gather proposals from industry May 27 for a program that aims to extract information from photons in order to develop new imaging systems.
DARPA said Friday it wants to develop a theoretical framework for unlocking data in complex environments using photon pathways of captured light under the Revolutionary Enhancement of Visibility by Exploiting Active Light-fields platform.
The agency intends for the photon data to inform the development of new imaging hardware and software technologies intended to help soldiers identify beyond line-of-sight threats.
“There are some current limited efforts attempting to exploit some of light’s multiple degrees of freedom, but Reveal aims to make a revolutionary leap forward by simultaneously addressing all aspects of light,” said Predrag Milojkovic, program manager in DARPA’s Defense Sciences Office.
DARPA also plans to launch a challenge that requires a three-dimensional reconstruction of a scene from a single viewpoint in order to evaluate the limitations of the framework.
“Ultimately, collecting all pertinent information about a scene could enable computational generation of arbitrarily located virtual viewpoints and effectively allow ‘flying through the scene’ without changing one’s physical location,” Milojkovic added.
