Computational Imaging for Scene Understanding

1Transient Imaging

Adrian JARABO

Graphics and Imaging Lab, University of Zaragoza, Spain

1.1. Introduction

In 1878, English photographer Eadweard Muybridge captured his famous Horse in Motion series, the first sequence of photographs able to capture a dynamic scene by using stop motion (Leslie 2001). His invention revolutionized photography, leading to ground-breaking innovations that ended up with the invention of the Lumière Cinématographe that gave birth to the cinema (Lumière 1936). But beyond that, this first sequence of photographs allowed people to analyze the dynamics of the horse at run, which was followed by many (up to 100,000 sequences) images of animals and humans in motion that allowed for better understanding on the dynamics of locomotion.

Being able to capture how the world evolves with time was a powerful tool for understanding the physical laws governing the world and how to carefully analyze experiments. Almost 90 years after Muybridge’s invention, Harold Edgerton pushed these photographic analyses of the world dynamics further, capturing them at 10,000 frames per second. A famous example of Edgerton’s captures is the Bullet Through Apple photograph, freezing in time ultrafast events such as the bullet penetrating through the apple (Bedi and Collins 1994). Seeing the world at that speed helped with understanding the mechanical behavior of fast dynamic systems such as liquid flows or explosions. However, while impressive on their own, all these high-speed ...