I was remarking the other day about some neighbors who caught the folks who broke into their house because a person across the street had a 1080p video camera which caught them going over the side fence (and fortunately facing the street).

And in my personal experience of "Imagine you could play a game where the graphics card would realistically render the battle from any angle in real time! No way, too much compute needed." where I really missed the notion that multi-core GPUs would grow like they had.

What this research says is that when you have pictures of people from high resolution cameras, that have high dynamic range, you will be able to pull out faces of people near them from corneal reflections. That won't be today obviously, it might not be five years from now, but don't count it out as "never."

Optics is nowhere near my specialty, but it does seem to me that you can only capture so much light with a lens, no matter how optically perfect it is, before diffraction causes you to lose information. Of course, bigger / more numerous lenses & sensors would alleviate this, but then that's probably not going to be stealthy. So, I don't see how improved technology (a sudden breakthrough in how light works notwithstanding) will fix this.

Please, could anybody in optics weigh in on this, perhaps with some math? I'm very much curious what the upper limit would be for a typical piece of 3" glass.

Realistically, if this is a goal, then manufacturers will just increase the sensor size until the goal is met. This isn't a cell phone, so the sensor size constraints are pretty forgiving for this platform.

* Note: I am no optics expect, this is just what I've picked up on my own.

It's incredibly tiny. As I understand it they etch individual pixels onto it, each of which can only receive light from a specific angle. As you make it larger and larger you can absorb more and more light at higher and higher resolutions, without dealing with lenses.

Although even lenses can do insane things like magnify individual cells to be human visible, or take pictures of distant galaxies. I don't know why everyone is so skeptical of merely photographing someone's eye.

Typical cell spacing is between 3 and 10 micro meter right now iirc and red light is around 650 nm, so about a factor of 5 to 10 or thereabouts.

Biggest enemies are not incident light quantity but thermal noise, as you get smaller in cell size that becomes a real problem (you can alleviate that with cooling).

That is true--with a single camera.

At some point, we will have so many cameras facing an objective that you can exceed the limits of individual optics.

And that, too, will get better with better hardware. At first, you may only be able to detect hair color and rough hair length in cases where the person being identified has a nice silhouette against an evenly lit sky, but that already is something.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffraction-limited_system

http://www.forzasilicon.com/2014/01/high-resolution-camera-f...

http://www.studiodaily.com/2014/04/so-you-think-4k-and-8k-lo...

"[...] Forza Silicon, which is introducing a new customizable video-camera platform that can reach "resolutions approaching 200 megapixels" at 60fps"

And there is "super-resolution" which combines multiple low-res pictures (e.g. frames of a video) into a single high resolution image: http://vimeo.com/6608238

Cover a wall with those. Full 3D capture.

Intersperse those on that wall with tiny pods of directional LEDs. Think "lenticular 3D" but with hemispheres instead of half-cylinders.

Remotely connect two of these walls. Result is a virtual 2-way window, with full natural 3D viewing without headgear. Could revolutionize teleconferencing: participant(s) are "just" on the other side of a glass wall...with the "other side" any distance away. Bandwidth required may be staggering relative to current video, yet is currently manageable.

That's ridiculous. Why is this even published?

The pace of technology is still limited by physics - if they take out the 2kW monster flash then the lens size needs to be increased to a diameter of several meters, just to maintain the same performance at a distance of 1 meter (!).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quantum_efficiency

We have no idea how hard it would be to recover an image using 50-5% of the light. No one has written that paper. Same for resolution. The paper does not claim to address that question so it seems silly to critique it for not doing so.

There are so many papers published based on very artificial circumstances on stuff that is later developed into usable things...

I'm sceptic that it will ever be even close to usable assuming sensor tech wont improve much and we don't reach some breakthrough in optics, i.e. bending light without huge heavy chunks of glass.

This experiment with huge flash guns and short distances is essentially like identifying the moon in an eye reflection and dreaming of doing deep space imaging the same way. The physics just don't allow it.

Then why don't you?

If you read the PLOS One acceptance criteria:

http://www.plosone.org/static/publication

you'll notice that scientific merit doesn't show up in there. The official policy is that if the methods and analysis are sound, then it will be accepted regardless of how irrelevant the actual study is. This is well known in academia and has resulted in a generally negative opinion of the journal among publishing researchers.

edit: I'd also like to point out that this isn't the case for all PLOS publications.

Year 2000 has passed, and we're all still waiting for our flying cars.

Also, people tend to totally overestimate limits of possibility. We haven't explored a lot of things that are possible with our current level of technology (again, mostly because economics). Moreover, our image processing algorithms are very crude. We're nowhere near efficient use of information encoded in images (in a way a theoretical Bayesian superintelligence would). A lot of things thought impossible become possible when you start throwing more and more "compute" at it. You can't break the laws of physics, but those laws are quite lenient.