Femto Photography

Femto-photography is a term used to describe a technique for recording the propagation of ultrashort pulses of light through a scene at a very high speed. A femto-photograph is equivalent to an optical impulse response of a scene and has also been denoted by terms such as a light-in-flight recording^[1] or transient image.^[2][3] Femto-photography of macroscopic objects was first demonstrated using a holographic process in the 1970s by Nils Abramsson at the Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden).^[1] A research team at the MIT Media Lab led by Ramesh Raskar more recently achieved a significant increase in image quality using a streak camera synchronized to a pulsed laser and modified to obtain 2D images instead of just a single scanline.^[4]