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Adobe and MIT develop new way to identify materials in images using AI

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Scientists at MIT and Adobe Research have developed a new way to identify materials using AI vision. They say that the system is not affected by shadows or inconsistent lighting and that it could one day be used to help guide robots that interact with objects in the real world. It may also ultimately come to Lightroom and Photoshop to assist with image editing more easily.

The machine-learning system allows you to specify just a single pixel of material, and it detects all pixels in the scene which match the material. It was trained using “synthetic” data, essentially 3D renders, although they say that it’s very effective at picking out materials in real scenes, too. There’s still a long way to go, although it looks like the team has taken a very big first step.

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The world’s smallest silicon LED could turn your phone into a high-power microscope

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Researchers at the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology (SMART) have developed a new silicon Light Emitting Diode (LED) and holographic microscope which between them could help turn your smartphone into a powerful, high-resolution microscope. Together they are both the world’s smallest LED and the world’s smallest holographic microscope.

This LED, they say, is comparable in output to much larger silicone LEDs. But, by “much larger”, we’re not talking huge. Remember, this is the world’s smallest silicon LED and it’s very small indeed. Smaller than the wavelength of light itself.

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The KineCAM is a DIY instant camera that prints out animated kinegrams

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It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a kinegram. While the term “kinegram” wasn’t really coined until the late 1990s, the process has actually been around since the 1890s. I remember they seemed to be quite popular in some kids’ toys in the 1980s before the world started getting more digital and then they kind of disappeared for the most part.

But as with a lot of old tech returning to popular culture, it looks like the kinegram is back, too. PhD student Ticha Sethapakdi and her team at MIT produced an instant Kinegram camera, the KineCAM. It’s based on a Raspberry Pi, shoots multiple images in sequence and then prints out a single kinegram on thermal paper using its built-in printer. The KineCAM was also presented this year at SIGGRAPH 2022.

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Engineers at MIT have built a wireless underwater camera that doesn’t need batteries

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According to scientific estimates, more than 95% of Earth’s oceans have never been observed. As SciTechDaily points out, this means that we’ve seen less of our own planet’s oceans than we have the surface of Mars. The biggest challenge in exploring the oceans, though, is powering cameras, particularly for a lengthy amount of time. They typically have to be tethered to research vessels or require regular trips out to swap batteries.

Researchers at MIT, though, have taken a pretty big leap in overcoming this hurdle by developing a battery-free, wireless underwater camera that they say is around 100,000 times more energy-efficient than other underwater cameras. It shoots photos in colour, even in the deep, dark underwater depths and transmits them wirelessly through the water.

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This 360° amphibious camera takes its optical design from the eyes of fiddler crabs

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One of the big problems you encounter when moving a camera from dry land to under the water is the difference in the index of refraction (IOR). That’s the thing that often makes rivers and lakes appear much shallower than they actually are when you’re looking at them from the water’s edge. For 360° cameras, this difference in IOR can be a big problem when it comes to shifting from the air to underwater.

A team of researchers at the Institute for Basic Science (IBS), Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Gwangju Institute of Science and Technology (GIST), the Seoul National University and The University of Texas at Austin, though, have developed a system based on one of nature’s designs. They’ve taken inspiration from the fiddler crab to develop a 360° camera system that works both in and out of the water.

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Scientists develop stamp sized ultrasound patches that create images of your internal organs

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From unborn babies in the womb to kidney stones, ultra sound technology is a marvelous thing. It allows us to see inside our bodies in a non-invasive way. It’s been used as a diagnostic tool in medicine for sometime now, at least 50 years and generally it requires a specialist radiologist or sonographer and bulky machines.

Scientists at MIT want to change all that and have invested an ultrasound ‘patch’, a little like a Nicorette patch, which can be sold in pharmacies or used in small doctor’s practices. And it’s the size of a postage stamp.

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These creepy images were completely generated by AI from just photo captions

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AI just gets weirder and weirder. And creepier. Researchers at the Allen Institute for AI have published new research which builds on OpenAI’s GPT-3 machine learning tech to generate images from scratch based just on the captions of photos.

It’s kind of the reverse of what Facebook does when you upload a photo to the platform and it generates captions. Here, you feed it captions and it generates the photo.

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Engineers at MIT & UMass Lowell have created a completely flat 1mm thick fisheye lens

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Love them or hate them (and many people hate them), we all know what fisheye lenses are. They look sort of like regular lenses, except they have a great big round bulbous element on the front that lets your camera’s sensor see in a super-wide field of view – typically around the 180° degree mark.

Well, not anymore. Now a team at MIT and University of Massachusetts Lowell have developed a new fisheye lens that’s completely flat. Its design is a type of “metalens” – a wafer-thin material with microscopic features to manipulate light in a way that traditional optics don’t. And it lets the lens shoot a 180° field of view with perfect sharpness.

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This camera can photograph a subject from 28 miles away

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Computational imaging has given us some interesting and useful inventions so far, from fake bokeh to capturing the movement of light. This time, scientists have figured out how to take a clear image from as far as 28 miles (45km), regardless of the Earth’s curvature and the amount of smog in the air.

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These MIT cinematography drones get the perfect shot every time

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Drone technology has come on so quickly in such a short space of time. Especially the camera technology. I’m not just talking about the quality of the optics and sensors, either. The “brains” behind the visual  systems in drones now is just nuts. Even modest consumer drones have facial recognition, subject tracking, and similar features. All these features and help us to achieve the best shot possible.

A team of research from MIT and ETH Zurich have now taken things way beyond that which is currently available to the masses. Building on the basic visual systems, theirs actually allows you to determine where in the frame the subject is positioned. It also lets you choose the camera angle. If you want full frontal, you got it. 3/4 left or right? No problem, it’s just the flick of a menu item.

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