A new imaging system can read closed

books. “The Metropolitan Museum in

New York showed a lot of interest in
this, because they want to, for
example, look into some antique books
that they don’t even want to touch,”
says Barmak Heshmat, a research
scientist at the MIT Media Lab.

Photo courtesy of Barmak Heshmat.

Judging a book through its cover

New computational imaging method identifies letters printed on first nine pages of
a stack of paper.
Watch Video

Larry Hardesty | MIT News Office

September 9, 2016 PRESS MENTIONS

MIT researchers and their colleagues are designing an imaging system that can read Daniel Akst of The Wall Street Journal writes
closed books. that by bouncing electromagnetic waves off of
pages, MIT researchers have developed a
way to read closed books. The system could
In the latest issue of Nature Communications, the researchers describe a prototype of the potentially be used also be used to count
system, which they tested on a stack of papers, each with one letter printed on it. The stacks of money and detect counterfeit
system was able to correctly identify the letters on the top nine sheets. currency, Akst explains.

“The Metropolitan Museum in New York showed a lot of interest in this, because they
want to, for example, look into some antique books that they don’t even want to touch,”
A new device developed by MIT
says Barmak Heshmat, a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab and corresponding
researchers can read the pages of a book
author on the new paper. He adds that the system could be used to analyze any materials without opening the cover, reports Nsikan
organized in thin layers, such as coatings on machine parts or pharmaceuticals. Akpan for the PBS NewsHour. The tool may
“unlock the secrets of old books or ancient
texts too fragile to be disturbed by human
Heshmat is joined on the paper by Ramesh Raskar, an associate professor of media arts touch.”
and sciences; Albert Redo Sanchez, a research specialist in the Camera Culture group at
the Media Lab; two of the group’s other members; and by Justin Romberg and Alireza
Aghasi of Georgia Tech.

Writing for CBS News, Charles Choi explores

a system developed by MIT researchers that
The MIT researchers developed the algorithms that acquire images from individual sheets can identify letters in a closed book. The
system could be used to examine ancient
in stacks of paper, and the Georgia Tech researchers developed the algorithm that
books or to “scan through large amounts of
interprets the often distorted or incomplete images as individual letters. “It’s actually kind documents without having to mechanically
of scary,” Heshmat says of the letter-interpretation algorithm. “A lot of websites have these separate the pages, which could be useful for
libraries, banks and others,” says research
letter certifications [captchas] to make sure you’re not a robot, and this algorithm can get
scientist Barmak Heshmat.
through a lot of them.”

Timing terahertz

MIT researchers have developed a system

The system uses terahertz radiation, the band of electromagnetic radiation between
that uses terahertz waves to read the pages
microwaves and infrared light, which has several advantages over other types of waves of a closed book, reports Michael Casey for
that can penetrate surfaces, such as X-rays or sound waves. Terahertz radiation has been the AP. Research scientist Barmak
Heshmat explains that the system works
widely researched for use in security screening, because different chemicals absorb
better than X-rays, as “it can contrast
different frequencies of terahertz radiation to different degrees, yielding a distinctive between the blank paper and the part that has
frequency signature for each. By the same token, terahertz frequency profiles can ink.”
distinguish between ink and blank paper, in a way that X-rays can’t.

Terahertz radiation can also be emitted in such short bursts that the distance it has
traveled can be gauged from the difference between its emission time and the time at
Salon reporter Scott Eric Kaufman writes that
which reflected radiation returns to a sensor. That gives it much better depth resolution
MIT researchers have created a system that
than ultrasound. can read the pages of a closed book and
could be used to examine manuscripts too
fragile to handle. “The system works by
The system exploits the fact that trapped between the pages of a book are tiny air pockets
shooting pulses of radiation from a terahertz
only about 20 micrometers deep. The difference in refractive index — the degree to which camera and measuring how long it takes for
they bend light — between the air and the paper means that the boundary between the them to bounce back."

two will reflect terahertz radiation back to a detector.

In the researchers’ setup, a standard terahertz camera emits ultrashort bursts of radiation,
and the camera’s built-in sensor detects their reflections. From the reflections’ time of
MIT researchers have developed a new
arrival, the MIT researchers’ algorithm can gauge the distance to the individual pages of
computational imaging technique that can
the book. read closed books, reports G. Clay Whittaker
for Popular Science. The technique could be
useful for “rare book research, where opening
True signals
a book may be impossible due to damage, or
not worth the risk of damage.”
While most of the radiation is either absorbed or reflected by the book, some of it bounces
around between pages before returning to the sensor, producing a spurious signal. The
sensor’s electronics also produce a background hum. One of the tasks of the MIT
researchers’ algorithm is to filter out all this “noise.”

The information about the pages’ distance helps: It allows the algorithm to hone in on just RELATED

the terahertz signals whose arrival times suggest that they are true reflections. Then, it
relies on two different measures of the reflections’ energy and assumptions about both the Project website
energy profiles of true reflections and the statistics of noise to extract information about
the chemical properties of the reflecting surfaces.
Barmak Heshmat

At the moment, the algorithm can correctly deduce the distance from the camera to the
top 20 pages in a stack, but past a depth of nine pages, the energy of the reflected signal Ramesh Raskar
is so low that the differences between frequency signatures are swamped by noise.
Terahertz imaging is still a relatively young technology, however, and researchers are
Camera Culture group
constantly working to improve both the accuracy of detectors and the power of the
MIT Media Lab
radiation sources, so deeper penetration should be possible.

"So much work has gone into terahertz technology to get the sources and detectors School of Architecture and Planning
working, with big promises for imaging new and exciting things,” says Laura Waller, an
associate professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of
California at Berkeley. “This work is one of the first to use these new tools along with
ARCHIVES
advances in computational imaging to get at pictures of things we could never see with
optical technologies. Now we can judge a book through its cover!"
Unlocking the past
with the future of
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