Light-Field for RF. Manikanta Kotaru, Guy Satat, Ramesh Raskar, Sachin Katti, arXiv:1901.03953 (2019).

Abstract

Most computer vision systems and computational photography systems are visible light based which is a small fraction of the electromagnetic (EM) spectrum. In recent years radio frequency (RF) hardware has become more widely available, for example, many cars are equipped with a RADAR, and almost every home has a WiFi device. In the context of imaging, RF spectrum holds many advantages compared to visible light systems. In particular, in this regime, EM energy effectively interacts in different ways with matter. This property allows for many novel applications such as privacy preserving computer vision and imaging through absorbing and scattering materials in visible light such as walls. Here, we expand many of the concepts in computational photography in visible light to RF cameras. The main limitation of imaging with RF is the large wavelength that limits the imaging resolution when compared to visible light. However, the output of RF cameras is usually processed by computer vision and perception algorithms which would benefit from multi-modal sensing of the environment, and from sensing in situations in which visible light systems fail. To bridge the gap between computational photography and RF imaging, we expand the concept of light-field to RF. This work paves the way to novel computational sensing systems with RF.