The researchers countered the blurring by giving it a physics lesson -- it knew how a defocused camera could produce blurring effects.

The result was an AI-based system that could find and reproduce hidden objects in lighting conditions would make even a dark room seem bright. That could help for nighttime photography, but the MIT research group is most interested in using the technology for medicine. It's normally hard to capture minute details in biological material without flooding them with light and radiation, risking damage to those tissues. This could avoid the problem by imaging tissues at much lower (and thus safer) light levels. It could help for astronomy, too, by detecting very faint objects without illumination.