MIT Engineers Create AI That Can See Around Corners Using Light

If the current artificial intelligence race has not made it clear yet, intelligent machines have huge financial and technological potential. They can process information faster, analyze data more efficiently, and apparently, they can even see around corners without actually looking. This is what engineers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have managed to create.

The AI is able to look around corners without taking a peek thanks to a property of light called penumbra, WIRED reports. This is basically where different gradients of shadows are cast, which results in different intensities of light.

Normal humans are incapable of seeing any of the details presented in penumbras, mostly because the degrees of difference is too small. However, machines are capable of not only detecting these differences but also processing what they mean, which is exactly what MIT engineers have done.

Using a camera pointed at the spot where the penumbra floods the area, the AI is capable of determining what is likely waiting around the corner. If a person wearing a bright red top is standing just around the corner, for example, they would block the light in such a way that would make the penumbra indicative of their presence.

According to Katie Bouman, the engineer who led the study, these activities are reflected in .1 percent of the light that’s reflected. Even so, the activities the reflection represents can be captured even by standard webcams.

“Because of this, it's very computationally inexpensive, since you're basically just doing a derivative,” Bouman says. “You’re just doing pixel differences, and so it works in real time.”

As for what this new discovery could possibly do, MIT personnel believe it can be used to give self-driving cars that extra edge on the road, Newsweek reports. Basically, driverless car AIs can potentially see what’s behind blind corners to detect obstacles or incoming vehicles.