Lidar and how it is everywhere, even your pocket

So i was looking at my new iphone 13 and i noticed Lidar in skimming the instructions.

and i have to say WOW

if my phone can make 3d renderings with real-time updates of whatever room my camera is in imagine what this stuff can do in a military grade platform

i know they use it for refueling but i don't know how they COULDNT use this for air recon.

or am i crazy thinking there might be aircraft flying around mapping in real time where everyone is.

it scary the amount of information you can get for image data like this.

i could see Lidar being paired with next gen IR to make sure it is hitting the right targets(for weapons used BVR) by matching targets with a index of targets.

very cool tech



ETA picture

so here is a screen shoot before rendering of what the laser thinks half my bed room looks like. you can see the window couch part of the bed, tv etc

a reply to: noscopebacon

Could this be used for face detection? Like when you're looking at the screen and moving the phone around a tiny bit naturally while handling, it scans your face a few times and has a very detailed 3D map of your face?

Like, really detailed? What about night vision? Since the light is coming from the lidar, it would be a good night vision for detecting edges and depth. As I understand it, it works like radar but using invisible light bouncing back and what comes back is a point cloud. I think that's what the triangles edges in your picture could be, the raw data. The flat surfaces were probably generated by averaging those points and normalizing.

I've worked with high detailed satellite radar data a few years ago, it looked almost the same from characteristics. Just look at any detailed 3D map from google, they use the same or similar technology for their 3D objects that are not handcrafted. It even maps out tiny details like roof tile 3D shape or cracked glass.

There are companies out there where you can, after getting a permit from a certain government agency, order such scans. Next few overpasses the area is mapped out. We wouldn't get the raw point cloud though but pre processed 3D maps that we fed into a tool that calculated some things from it.

Now these things are getting into our homes, if we want or not. Visitors will carry such devices around. Does not take a genius to figure out the huge potential for abuse. I don't think this was integrated as a gimmick for nerds. It's too useless for a normal person and those that need the technology go on amazon and buy one.

For me it's clear what this is about, call me paranoid but the balance between usefulness for the user and whoever may want to access such data is clearly in favor of the latter.

a reply to: noscopebacon

Yeah bro!
Lidar is wonderful.
Been using photogrammetry for about 12 years now.
Recently moved into Lidar full time.

This is the bad boy I have

a reply to: noscopebacon

Mind the Batman movie when Alfred utilized mobile phones to map a building?

Lidar looks pretty cool.

a reply to: TDDAgain

as far as i know it is only on the refacing cameras, Lidar is a laser imaging system usually used by the military in refueling mid air.

it builds a picture how close something is and sets alarms if it goes past that and usually weather doesnt effect it(HEAVY snow and raid will) like how close a jet is to the tanker air craft



as far as what this is far im not 100% sure, Lidar is for mapping NASA has found ANCIENT cities under the jungle cyanope down in South America from satellites with lidar on them.

clearly it had no problem mapping a good part of the room i was in in less than a second the only thing i can see it being used for is AR(augmented reality) stuff or maybe better pictures or even 3d pics

i made a 3 model of my living room and i could pout it on my computer and walk around with my HTC setup. there were some mess ups but its was like 90% there, add that to real time spatial audio and down to even using wifi to map a room i could see how this Lidar on a phone could be a very powerful spy tool

remember that scene in batman when he linked all the cell phones.


the more creepy tech they put on our phones it just shows me another way they can take a peek

a reply to: Macenroe82

that's super cool

do you ever have to wear goggles

i would think the more resolution would require thing power beams

its really amazing watching it recreate a room and not in 2D

a reply to: andy06shake

great minds think alike apparently

a reply to: noscopebacon

LiDAR is used in satellite platforms that orbit the Earth for multiple purpose, think of it as space radar but instead of bouncing radio waves off its target, LiDAR uses short pulses of laser light to form a picture of whatever its aimed towards.

a reply to: noscopebacon

Another example of art imitating life would be "Battlestar Galactica" where the Vipers and Galactica utilize some kind of LiDAR as there primary sensor platform.

a reply to: noscopebacon

I know, my car has a few of those LIDAR sensors.

I don't think what I worked with / got the results from was LIDAR, I think it was microwave radar or similar. You know, from space I don't think it will work, with so much atmosphere in between.

Well it makes sense from the META and VR side of things to enable people to do such scans. It may be the main reason they put it in, less for nefarious reasons.

Yes I remember that scene from the batman movie. It's sensor fusion in a way or another. I know though, because I saw it years ago, that with a WLAN router and at least two antennas it is possible to map out a room by looking for noise and then let the computer chew on that. The more movement there is, the better the resolution was. Like using the reflections and difference in flight time of the radio waves.

He explained it I think like this, unrelated to LIDAR but it fits: Imagine a big empty room with a light source that can also receive / sense light coming back it send out. Now have people walk around they will cast shadows and through the size of that missing data, you already have a 2D image, like a shadow. If you now add a second light source that sends out light in a slight different way, so the antennas know the origin, you have leading and tracing shadows that you can use to calculate a depth dimension and now you have a 3D image of the room.

Just that it is not light but higher EM frequency radiation.

Like our eyes work, just with antenna, in stereo.

On my skidsteer the engine has breaker points mounted off the bottom of the engine where it's impossible to work on, let alone see. There's 1 youtube video of a guy with the same, all you see is his elbows. I used the iphone lidar to make a 3d model by reaching in with the phone. It really helped. I supposedly could measure with it, I don't know about .020 however.

originally posted by: Macenroe82
a reply to: noscopebacon

....Recently moved into Lidar full time.

Thats very interesting, I bet you've captured some cool footage.

BTW.. check your PM's
Johnny

a reply to: JohnnyAnonymous

Replied!

I find the level of surveillance in today's society to be a bit unnerving, personally; it doesn't take much of a stretch of ones' imagination to see how it could be weaponized at some point in time.

I've seen google images of my property and it's clear I can't even dig a hole to plant a rose bush, let alone a 6' prone object. Maybe that's a good thing....

April 25, 2022 - The Earth Observing System Data and Information System is a key core capability in NASA’s Earth Science Data Systems Program. It provides end-to-end capabilities for managing NASA’s Earth science data from various sources—satellites, aircraft, field measurements, and various other programs.

Mankind has a habit of using things designed to help our planet in nefarious ways against its inhabitants, which makes me a bit apprehensive of this Genii.

[www.earthdata.nasa.gov...]

originally posted by: Macenroe82
a reply to: noscopebacon

Yeah bro!
Lidar is wonderful.
Been using photogrammetry for about 12 years now.
Recently moved into Lidar full time.

This is the bad boy I have

that is wild.

it just makes you wonder what is the real and true cutting edge of imaging

i have a few drones from DJI myself but all for personal enjoyment, i have one with a FLIR and normal camera and i love it. I feel like if flying a little bombing mission when I'm harassing the squirls

LIDAR is pretty cool tech.

It works essentially the same as sonar, with a few differences. Firstly, of course, it uses laser light instead of sound. Light has this amazing property that sound does not: different wavelengths of light penetrate different materials differently. That's how LIDAR can penetrate jungle growth and some layers of soil even. Since we do have solid state lasers that can adjust wavelengths (to varying degrees), we can adjust the penetration on the fly.

The biggest problem is with the use of lasers. Normal LIDAR uses wavelengths that the human eye is sensitive to, so the power has to be minuscule and this affects reliability (we can only detect accurately with a certain power level). 1550 nm, if I remember correctly, is eye-safe, but that wavelength is expensive to produce and detect (plus it means we cannot adjust wavelength).

I believe there's some work done on using red shift to detect speed as well. I'm not that up to date on that aspect. It seems that it would take some pretty sensitive wavelength discrimination to do much good in that department, but technology has surprised me before and probably will again many times.

TheRedneck

a reply to: TheRedneck

i have seen it used in crime scene imaging(lidar that is)

seen it used for BDA (battle damage assessments)

to even mapping an area down to less than an inch accuracy from a 100$ drone is a game changer.

a reply to: noscopebacon
They are even using lidar in 3D printers now to check that the first layer went down correctly and do flow compensation, bambu labs.

a reply to: noscopebacon

That's where LIDAR shines.

The amount of information in a 3D image compared to a 2D image is astronomical. Our ability to navigate around obstacles is based in large part on us having a 3D representation of our environment (we use the slightly different perspective of our two eyes to create this).

Unfortunately, we haven't come close to real-time LIDAR a'la what we are used to seeing. The main issue is speed of the technology. LIDAR scans one "pixel" of data at a time, similar to the way a TV camera scans each pixel. Unlike photographical-based scanning, LIDAR scannig requires that a pulse of laser light is emitted and then detected after a set time period. Light is fast, very last, but that's still not fast enough for real-time. LIDAR provides snapshots every few seconds apart at best, and every few minutes apart at worst.

Luckily, use as an archive or snapshot like in a criminal investigation does not require real-time imaging.

There is Flash LIDAR, which illuminates an entire area instead of a "pixel" at a time, using a wide-dispersal laser. However, it also requires some seriously complex parallel sensing to operate, and that is quite expensive and bulky. Especially in, say 1080p HD, which is 1920 x 1080 pixels, that's over two million parallel sensor circuits. Even standard 720p HD, 1280 x 720 pixels, would require almost a million parallel circuits.

4K HD? That's 7680 x 4032 pixels, so around 31 million parallel sensor circuits.

Flash LIDAR, when it is used, does not have anything anyone would consider as high resolution, or even "standard" resolution.

TheRedneck