NYU Researchers Develop Invisible Flash – Shoot Pictures in the Dark!

Posted by Shahbaaz ||

August 5, 2009 ||

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If you got the fancy of photographing in the dark and chilling out with your friends in the night, for a barbeque in the lawn or just camping in the woods, then freezing the fun on a photo would be actually a little difficult, given the bright bulb spots and inadequate light ambience.

No matter how good your camera and its bright flash are and whatever good your photography is, you’ll always get shots that are not-so-perfect and then you comfort yourself reiterating a belief that “nice pic…it would have been still better if it wasn’t dark”.

Then these two guys from New York University , Robert Fergus and Dilip Krishnan answer the call of many a million like you. They have come with a camera that takes pictures in the dark without a flash. Yes, it’s possible now with the so called “Dark Flash” technology they have used to create the camera and will publicly elaborate on it at Siggraph Conference 2009, New Orleans this August.

Photography Pioneer : Invisible Flash Technology
Photography Pioneer : Images Shot Using Invisible Flash Camera

This invisible flash makes use of the light rays outside the visible spectrum to reproduce the subject on in an image. The Invisible Flash Camera actually uses a flash bulb that has been modified to emit light in wider ranges and filtering out the visible spectrum. The camera’s image sensor detecting IR and UV rays have also been removed to match with the technology.

But, once the picture is shot using the camera with invisiblef lash, the pictures seem to have an improper color balance, reportedly, like the ones shot using night-vision scope. So, immediately after the first shot with dark flash, the camera captures a second shot of the subject without flash.

Using a software to merge the darker image from the second shot and the image shot with invisible flash, a finer real image is obtained.Though this is impressive enough,there is a minor problem with this. The objects that absorb both UV and IR would not light up in the image, thus leaving the developers of the dark flash camera a room for improvement.

If shooting images in the dark is possible, we can expect that similar technology can be applied to video recording using dark flash as well, but we cannot expect it to hit the markets very soon, not at least the some big fish in the market like Canon, Sony or Casio is willing to embrace this technology and produce the Invisible Flash Camera.

View the complete NYU Study (.pdf) here.

Lights. Camera. Action!

Tags: camera, Dark Flash, invisible flash, invisible flash camera, Siggraph Con

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