London, Jan 29 (ANI): Inspired by Superman’s ability to see through walls and doors, scientists have found a way to transmit simple images through opaque objects using ordinary light.

Physicists projected an image through glass covered in thick paint.

Sylvain Gigan and colleagues at Ecole Superieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles in Paris, France, have for the first time, transmitted simple images through an opaque object and reconstructed on the far side.

By reverse engineering the scattering process, the team could reconstruct an image from light that had passed through the opaque paint layer.

The scattering is complex, but it’s also regular- the same light wave will always be scattered in the same way.

The way a particular object scatters light is known as its transmission matrix.

“If the [layer of paint] is a maze for light, then you could think of the transmission matrix as the map for it,” New Scientist quoted Gigan as saying.

His team worked out the transmission matrix for their painted glass slide by hitting it with a weak laser beam more than 1000 times, changing the shape of the beam each time using a spatial light modulator - the same device used to control the light emerging from a video projector.

A digital camera on the other side of the glass detected the different scattering patterns produced each time.

Comparing what it saw with what had been done to the laser beam made it possible to measure the paint’s complete transmission matrix.

When a simple 256-pixel image was then projected onto the paint, a person simply looking at the paint would see only an even glow.

But the team used knowledge of the transmission matrix to decode the faint, noisy trace that reached the digital camera and reconstruct the image.

“Once the matrix is known, reconstructing the image is very quick. We can achieve almost video-rate focusing or imaging,” said Gigan.

However, it will be some time before the technique is used to transmit and reconstruct any truly interesting images - the test patterns were very simple patterns: a 256-pixel rectangular grid with a handful of its squares lit up more brightly.

“The quality of the images degrades rapidly when increasing the number of pixels, because the signal-to-noise ratio degrades,” said Gigan.

Although, he said that there is “room for improvement” with future study.

The study is available on the Physics Arxiv. (ANI)