Events

CS Colloquium: Superhuman Vision by Co-designing Cameras, Graphics and AI

Speaker: Akshat Dave, MIT Media Lab

Location: 60 Fifth Avenue, Room 150

Date: Monday, March 31, 2025

Imagine machines that can see the invisible—drones locating wildfire survivors, cameras predicting building failures, and smartphones detecting skin tumors. These applications lie beyond today’s vision systems, which focus only on human-visible information. In this talk, I argue that a wealth of scene information is hidden in light properties invisible to the human eye, such as the travel time of photons and polarization of light waves. I will present how co-designing camera hardware, graphics models and learning algorithms unlocks these invisible properties to create superhuman vision systems. I will present three superhuman vision capabilities: seeing around blind corners, turning objects into cameras, and extracting internal stress fields. By analyzing faint light reflections on diffuse walls and shiny objects, we create virtual cameras that reveal scenes hidden from the line of sight—enabling autonomous systems to navigate safely. Using the polarization of light, we recover mechanical stress fields hidden inside objects, opening new possibilities for non-destructive material characterization. These capabilities point toward a future where machines can see the invisible: around us, beneath our bodies, and beyond our scientific understanding.