Solution for camera phones to see through the night

To see through the night, instead of the ever-cumbersome and expensive infrared glasses, researchers at MIT have a much more compact solution that can only need their camera. phone only. The results of this study will open a new direction for photography in low-light environments and many other needs of life and society.

Solution to help your phone camera look through the night

We often see pictures of soldiers wearing special infrared glasses that can see through the night, even in places without light in action movies. These glasses have sensors that convert heat signals into electrical signals and create images. Today's popular cameras cannot do this because of physical limitations and temperature problems. Researchers at MIT have found a solution to this problem, opening a new path for low-light photography as well as other uses in life.

The current image sensor has a mechanism that acts like a human eye, light shines on the object and snaps into the human eye. So if there is no light, both us and the camera don't see anything.

The diagram depicts the light spectrum in which light is normally recorded by the eye (400nm-700nm).

And the infrared glasses read infrared light, emitted from the temperature of objects (wavelengths from 700nm onwards). When the normal sensor reads these infrared light, it will generate very high temperatures, along with infrared radiation interference, . Previously scientists have tried to use a cooling system. and succeeded, but the system was too cumbersome and expensive

Researchers at MIT have found a more optimal new sensor cooling solution, using honeycomb-shaped Graphene leaves . This type of material is extremely thin, flexible, transparent and harder than metal. Graphene layers will be arranged into bars into the sensor, helping solve the problem of heat emission, so that light can be read in spectral bands that are normally unreadable.

Graphene Leaf (left) and actual test with the MIT Logo (right).

Currently this solution has been applied in practice and researchers can see the image of the hand waving in the darkness or the MIT Logo thanks to the radiant temperature (see photo above). However, this technology is still only at the beginning with low resolution. In the future, this technology will be further developed with higher resolution and can be applied in many other devices such as phone cameras or in transport vehicles to move in the night.