From an article in Fossbytes.
Chinese researchers have developed a new Lidar (Light detection and ranging) based camera that can snap photographs of subjects from 45 kilometers away. This is not the first instance of attempts at long-distance photography, but environmental disturbances like pollution hinder capturing subjects beyond a distance.
Zheng-Ping Li and his colleagues from the University of Science and Technology of China have successfully captured subjects from 45 kilometers (28 miles) away in an environment covered with a dense smog.
How Does The Lidar Camera Work?
The Lidar-based system combines single-photon detectors with a breakthrough computational imaging algorithm to create super-high-resolution images by joining the sparsest of data points.
The camera was set up on the 20th floor of a building situated in Chongming Island in Shanghai, and the subjects were captured 45 kilometers away at Pudong Civil Aviation Building across the river.
The Lidar system deployed in the camera illuminates the subject with laser light and then creates an image from the reflected light.
The reflected light is received within a time frame that depends upon the distance. This ensures that photons that are received beyond a specific time duration can be discarded, thus producing noise-free photographs.
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