Andreas Velten, a Morgridge Institute Affiliate with the Medical Engineering Group and assistant scientist with UW–Madison Laboratory of Optical and Computational Instrumentation, won a grant for his work in imaging technology through the Air Force’s Young Investigator Research Program (YIP). The Air Force Office of Scientific Research awarded approximately $16.6 million in grants to 57 scientists and engineers from research institutions and small businesses through the program.
The program aims to foster creative basic research in science and engineering, enhance career development skills and opportunities of young researchers, and increase recognition of current challenges in science and engineering that support the Air Force mission.
Velten describes his project below:
“In conventional imaging, resolution decreases as the observed object is placed further away from the observer.
For example, we can read the license plate on the car driving right in front of us, but we may barely be able to make out a car driving a mile down the road.
While this degradation with distance seems inevitable for images, it does not happen to time encoded information. We can measure the frequency of a radio station accurately as long as its radio waves reach us at all. We can measure the spectrum of a star at the other side of our galaxy almost as well as the spectrum of a light bulb in our lab. Other than images, time encoded signals do not degrade as the travel large distances.
Multiply reflected light, when it is reflected back and forth between parts of a scene, transfers information about the geometry of a scene into the time response of the scene. Time Encoded Remote Aperture (TERA) imaging uses this information encoded in the time dependence of light coming from a scene to reconstruct images of the scene.
This time encoded aperture information can travel undistorted over large distances and does not require an imaging system with a large aperture to achieve a high resolution. TERA Imaging has potential applications in endoscopic imaging, microscopy, remote sensing, and astronomy.”