Scientists Create A Camera That Can Capture Full Color In Pitch Blackness

Photo 181182552 © Grafner | Dreamstime.com

Forget Vantablack, the world’s blackest black pigment which is owned by Anish Kapoor. This AI-powered camera is all about finding color in the darkness.

Developed by a team of researchers from the University of California, Irvine, a new infrared camera system can render full-color photos when it’s completely dark out.

The technology looks to night vision cameras, which detect infrared light to generate imagery that appears beyond humans’ perception of light. Infrared footage is usually shown in monochromatic green, though, and the scientists wanted a full spectrum of colors. So they turned to artificial intelligence.

By now, AI would be very well aware of what certain objects look like, and the presumption is that it can recognize and visualize those objects in the dark too. The new technology combines the prowess of infrared cameras and a neural network, which the team trained to find associations in infrared images and photos captured in the visible spectrum.

Image via Browne et al / PLOS One (open access)

“This would make it possible to digitally render a visible spectrum scene to humans when they are otherwise in complete ‘darkness’ and only illuminated with infrared light,” the team shared in a paper published in the PLOS One scientific journal.

The AI studies infrared pictures and is able to predict what they might look like as “perceived by a human with visible spectrum light.” In other words, it is able to visualize the colors in those photos too.

One caveat: For now, the tool seems most effective with human faces, and additional calibration would be required for the system to successfully predict colors in other scenarios.

[via PetaPixel and IFLScience, images via various sources]