Education Policy, Business and Technology

Stanford Team Develops 4D Camera for Use in Robots, VR, Autonomous Cars

Campus Technology: Stanford researchers have designed a new 4D camera for use in robotics, autonomous vehicles and virtual and augmented reality technologies.

"We want to consider what would be the right camera for a robot that drives or delivers packages by air," said Donald Dansereau, a postdoctoral fellow in electrical engineering, in a report about the new camera. "We're great at making cameras for humans but do robots need to see the way humans do? Probably not."

The camera uses a technique called light field photography, originally described by Stanford professors Marc Levoy and Pat Hanrahan in 1996, that captures information about the direction and distance of the light that hits the sensor. Light field photography allows for images that can be refocused after they are taken and could allow robots to see through things like rain, that might otherwise obscure their vision.

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