In 2019, the French-German Research Institute of Saint-Louis (ISL) is celebrating its 60th anniversary, but the roots of the institute are going back to the early end of the WWII when a team of German scientists led by Prof. Schardin from the Air Force Technical Academy (Technische Akademie der Luftwaffe) in Berlin-Gatow came in the Upper Rhine to work for the French Army. There, the Prof. Schardin was working in the field of ballistics and was world-wide renowned for his works in high-speed physics. In his early years, as a permanent assistant to the eminent German ballistics Professor Carl Cranz, he developed the famous Cranz-Schardin camera, a revolutionary electro-optical high-speed cinematography method using electric sparks or flash x-rays for illumination and able to work at frame rates over 106 images/second. This technique brought huge improvements in the comprehension of ballistic phenomenon and moreover in high-speed physics. Since 1945, the LRSL, renamed ISL in 1959, maintained a leading position in the domain of high-speed phenomenon. In the beginning of the 60's, the invention of the laser was a true revolution that permits the emergence of new techniques like holography and interferometric holography. With the introduction of semiconductor lasers, ISL has a leading position on range-gated active imaging and deploys a significant research effort in a new emerging domain: computational imaging which includes scientific thematic such as see around the corner, compressed sensing or imaging with multiple scattered photons.
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