Humans have long sought ways to extend their vision, hearing, and other sensory capabilities, and there has been a long history of scientific and technological progress. These efforts have involved new physical devices that enhance existing human sensory capabilities (e.g., microscopes and stroboscopes), and and also the use of information from modalities humans cannot sense (e.g., radio frequency wave-forms and X-rays). Today we have the ability to jointly manipulate these sources of information both physically and computationally, via signal processing, to ever increasing degrees, and the resulting technologies are finding application in diverse domains. While interference effects would appear to limit the information that can be extracted, this need not be the case, as the familiar example of a pinhole camera illustrates. Motivated by such examples, this project develops, in a unified way, the role that such phenomena have to play in enhancing the amount of information that can be recovered from environments of interest. Potential applications include medicine, public safety, building security systems, autonomous vehicle safety systems, microscopy and astronomy, and virtual and augmented reality systems. The proposed research is a highly education-centered activity with a focus around the intellectual and professional development of students.
The research investigates several instances and aspects of occlusion-based imaging problems, including: the analysis and optimization of interference phenomena; the development of optimum information extraction and inference of environmental parameters of interest; and investigation of blind methods for poorly characterized settings. The research emphasizes a common framework of analysis, and exploits a rich collection of tools from signal processing, statistical inference, systems theory, and information theory.
This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
