Diego Gutiérrez, Belén Masiá and Adrián Jarabo, researchers from the Graphics and Imaging Lab group, the latter now at Meta, began more than 10 years ago to develop, in collaboration with MIT, a novel computational imaging technique called femto-photography, with which they were able for the first time to reconstruct events at an effective frequency of one trillion frames per second. This frequency is so fast that they were even able to capture and visualise the propagation of light.
His work is now being recognised with the Test-of-Time Award, a prize for work that has had a significant and lasting impact on the field of computer graphics and computational imaging over the past decade. The award will be presented at the upcoming international computer graphics conference, SIGGRAPH, in Denver.
Since that first step in 2013, other lines have emerged around femto-photography that have continued to develop the principles presented in the original article, including, among others, the one that the members of the Graphics and Imaging Lab themselves published in the prestigious journal Nature in 2019. The research group at I3A (Instituto de Investigación en Ingeniería de Aragón), at the University of Zaragoza, participated in a project funded by the US agency DARPA, and is currently leading an European project worth more than eight million euros to continue to advance the development of this technology..
Thanks to femto-photography, techniques have begun to be developed to see objects around corners, with applications in fields as diverse as automatic driving of vehicles, planning of rescue actions, remote inspection of lunar caves (a project in which the group collaborated with NASA) or medical imaging, among others.
