Speaker 2
What really made me pursue these ideas is just simple things from science fiction to home discussions. If you've seen Predator and Arnold Schwazeniger in there, you see that the Predator kind of sees in the night and that's why it's able to hunt its prey really well. And so one thing I've read about in terms of trying to understand
Speaker 1
like heat signatures to make night vision is a challenge that's called the ghosting effect. Can you explain what this is and why this is a challenge for you? So
Speaker 2
when you look at an image that is just generated by the heat signatures from the body, the entire environment around you is also emitting heat radiation. So that actually bounces off your body and reaches the camera. So suppose your friend is taking a picture of you, you'll appear almost as a ghost to them because there's so much signal and there is a lot of noise that is just always present in thermal signatures. So that's what we really mean by ghosting, just the lack of texture, lack of contrast and the lack of information inside
Speaker 1
an image. And in your paper, you've developed something called a haydar system, which seems to get around this problem. Can you tell me a bit about this system and how it works? So
Speaker 2
when we started analyzing the problem, we started going back into the attributes of thermal physics, which are essentially our simple understanding of what is hot, what is cold. The other aspect is emissivity, it's the property of the body to emit heat. And then finally, the most interesting thing is the texture. So what we came up with are a bunch of algorithms, they are machine learning driven, but we embed the our understanding of thermal physics inside the algorithms. And then we also use some advanced cameras to actually put all the hardware and software together and extract optimal information from the thermal radiation, even in pitch darkness.
