Researchers at Georgia Tech have developed a prototype system to cancel out a digital camera trying to take a picture aimed its way. The system, described in more detail in this news.com article, targets any detected digital camera lens with focused light to thwart successful picture-taking. Where the photographer might have tried to capture a private meeting or an inappropriate picture, they instead will have a “blurry picture of what looks like a flashlight beam.”

The technology works by actively detecting a digital camera lens based on its ‘retroreflective’ properties. Digital camera lenses are much more retroreflective than other surfaces, such as eyeglasses. The system is constantly putting out infrared light to find any spying cameras; after sensing a camera lens aimed towards the system, it immediately targets the origin with a “localized beam of light” to neutralize the attempted photograph. The researchers provide more detail at their page describing the project.

This entry was posted by Paul Otto (pnotto@ncsu.edu) on Tuesday, September 20th, 2005 at 10:05 am and is filed under Technologies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

Note: Blog posts are the opinions of their authors and do not reflect the official opinion of the National Science Foundation or North Carolina State University.