Can a camera be self sustaining?

For cameras to be more widely deployed, there are two important requirements they need to satisfy. First, they need to be self-sustaining, in that, they should be able to capture and transmit visual information without the use of a power supply and without being tethered to other devices or infrastructure. Second, when used in applications that do not require identification of humans, they should preserve privacy. We will present recent results on the creation of such self-sustaining imaging systems. Our approach uses energy harvested from the light falling on the camera to fully power the camera, enabling it to make visual measurements as well as wirelessly transmit these measurements, without the use of a battery or an external power supply. We will conclude the talk with a related result that enables forecasting the energy harvested by a solar panel from a single image taken from close to it.

About the Speaker

Shree K. Nayar is the T. C. Chang Professor of Computer Science at Columbia University. He heads the Columbia Imaging and Vision Laboratory (CAVE), which develops computational imaging and computer vision systems. Nayar received his PhD degree in Electrical and Computer Engineering from the Robotics Institute at Carnegie Mellon University. For his research and teaching he has received several honors including the David Marr Prize (1990 and 1995), the David and Lucile Packard Fellowship (1992), the National Young Investigator Award (1993), the NTT Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award (1994), the Keck Foundation Award for Excellence in Teaching (1995), the Columbia Great Teacher Award (2006), the Carnegie Mellon Alumni Achievement Award (2009), Sony Appreciation Honor (2014), the Columbia Engineering Distinguished Faculty Teaching Award (2015), the IEEE PAMI Distinguished Researcher Award (2019), the Funai Achievement Award (2021), and the Okawa Prize (2022). For his contributions to computer vision and computational imaging, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 2008, the Ame rican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2011, the National Academy of Inventors in 2014, and the Indian National Academy of Engineering in 2022.