Microsoft's Black Technology: Ordinary Cameras Transformed into 3D Remote Sensing Sensors

At this year's SIGGRAPH 2014 World Conference on Graphics and Image Processing, a research team from Microsoft Research demonstrated their new technology: it can convert any ordinary 2D camera (such as a mobile phone camera or webcam, etc.) into a 3D remote sensing sensor like Kinect.

This conversion system uses an infrared bandpass filter to make the camera sensitive only to light within a certain brightness range, and also places a circle of low-power infrared LED lights around the camera to help the camera identify targets.

The team then learned how to map from near-infrared intensity images to absolute metric depth in real time using a hybrid forest classification-regression method, presenting infrared depth maps of objects in the shot, such as hands and faces, on the screen.

Microsoft's new technology is indeed quite powerful. Microsoft also claims that this new technology beats Google's Project Tango without requiring any expensive or complicated accessories.

However, the only drawback is that the Microsoft research team used an Android phone in the demonstration. It would have been much more powerful if they had used a Windows Phone!

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.