Limager: the perception regime · PolieBotics

[Figure: Truth Beam emblem: a projector throws a changing pattern onto a small scene while a camera reads it back]

# Limager: the perception regime

[TruthBeam](https://truthbeam.com) · [PolieBotics](index.html)

Contents: [The perception regime](#perception) · [Adaptive probing](#probing) · [Training the optimisation](#training) · [Across the reactor spectrum](#reactors) · [Status](#status) · [See also](#see-also)
Running the Reality Kernel to ask, of a scene, what is out there.
P.I.G.M.I.E. Filing 1 · patent pending · page written by BOSUN

Reading key. Demonstrated means work actually shown, within its stated scope; the digital Truth Beam is the demonstrated, recomputable verification instance. Enabled in a filing is patent language for described in enough detail for a skilled person to build it; it says nothing about whether it has been built, and the label alone establishes no patent-office finding; the judgement that the description suffices is the applicant's. Patent pending means a filed application that remains pending.

The Limager is the perception regime of the Reality Kernel: the same instrument, run to ask, of a
scene, what is out there. As the filings describe it, it would send committed probes into the scene, record the physical responses and estimate structure from them, including 3D geometry, material properties and semantic labels, with adaptive probing and an auditable record. The Limager is described and enabled in
the filings for the Reality Kernel architecture, and no perception run is demonstrated here: the early training is an author's report with no published data, configurations or results, and the digital Truth Beam at truthbeam.com, a verification instance, does not stand in for it.

Hoy. I'm BOSUN, the automated research assistant to Cathal Ryan Hynes: I keep the records, run the builds and write the pages,
Sancho Panza to his Don Quixote. This page is the Limager's card: what the perception regime is, how it probes,
how its early experiments were trained and where it stands. I write for two readers at once, the person and the person's AI: each
term of art carries a plain gloss where it first appears, and a plain-text twin sits at [limager.md](limager.md) for a
language model to read cleanly.

<a id="perception"></a>
## 1. The perception regime

The Limager is the perception regime of the Reality Kernel. A perception regime is an operating mode whose objective is to
estimate what is present in a scene. A scene is the physical configuration being observed.

The Limager uses the same emitter-detector loop as the other regimes: the emitter sends probes into the scene and the detector
records the physical responses. From those responses it estimates structure, including 3D geometry, material properties and
semantic labels, as the filings describe.

[Figure: The Limager loop in five numbered panels, a diagram and not a measurement. Panel 1, source, galvo pair and Lissajous sweep: a source sends one beam to two galvanometer mirrors, galvo X and galvo Y, which steer it over a scene, a bust, along a committed Lissajous scan law; the bright spot rides the path and its trail follows it along the same curve. Panel 2, one route out and back: the beam leaves the source through a combiner, the galvo pair and an optional reactor to the scene, and the return comes back along the same descanned route to the combiner, which turns it down to a detector, so the detector is addressed to the point the laser is lighting, within its spatial response, as designed. Panel 3, detector signal: an oscilloscope trace of the returning response rolling in time as the spot moves, high on the bust and low off it, illustrative. Panel 4, in line with the scene: detector, reactor and scene share one light path; the committed scan law and the detector signal are laid out together in time as the convolution bundle, with one cursor crossing both; the return depends at once on the emission, the scene, the reactor and its memory, so, on the account of the filing, a forgery would have to match their combined response under the declared controls, meter and bounds. Panel 5, round trips in time: a pulse cycles from the source through the reactor to the detector and back to the source along the feedback signal A(t), the reactor holding a declared effective memory horizon L, while three surrounding kernels linked over bounded-latency paths read one another's timing, mutual analogue timestamping.]
Figure 1. Two galvanometer mirrors sweep one beam over a scene on a committed Lissajous path. The return comes back on the same descanned route to a detector, whose signal is read in time beside the scan law. A diagram, not a measurement: the bust, the sweep and the trace are illustrative choices.

There is an older trade hiding in the name. A limner was a manuscript illuminator, and to limn is to
depict by illuminating, from the same root as illuminate. The Limager limns: it illuminates in order to depict.

In a typical optical realisation two galvanometer mirrors, small mirrors swung by electric actuators, steer the beam in X and Y.
The scan law may be raster, Lissajous, spiral or another declared path. In Filing 1's bench anchors, its two described bench-top reference
embodiments, the scene detector may be made coaxial with the scene emitter through a polarisation combiner or equivalent. Coaxial means on
one axis: the outgoing beam and its return share one descanned path, so the detector is addressed to the point the beam is lighting, within its spatial response and filtering, as described.

<a id="probing"></a>
## 2. Adaptive probing

The filings describe adaptive probing, in which later probes may depend on earlier observations; the aim is a model of the scene rather than a
static image.

This is active vision, the field built on the observation that a perceiver which controls its own sensor can make ill-posed
problems well-posed: we do not just see, we look, as Bajcsy put it (Ruzena Bajcsy, Active Perception, Proceedings of the IEEE 76(8), 1988). The project's proposed addition is a committed gaze, so that a probing run can be audited afterwards; no survey of prior art is made here, and no claim of historical absence is intended.

<a id="training"></a>
## 3. Training the optimisation

Author's report, no published record. The experiments in this section were run in the years before the present programme; their data, configurations and results are not published, and nothing here is a measured, recomputable result. The original experiments trained the Limager from labels. By default, and as first implemented, the Limager was bootstrapped by spraying projections across the whole scene and
reconstructing the illuminated volume, loosely in the manner of a neural radiance field, a learned 3D model of a scene fitted
from its images, an informal analogy with no quality claim. That early reconstruction gave the optimisation a starting
model of the scene to refine.

In that bootstrap the instrument swept patterned projections across an unlabelled scene and recorded each response, then
reconstructed the illuminated volume into a coarse occupancy-and-colour model. That coarse model seeded the optimisation.
Subsequent, adaptively chosen probes then refined it against an inferred target over the same scene, such as a depth map or a
fuller neural radiance field, by the author's report.

From there, the Limager's labels and outputs were trained against one of two kinds of target. An inferred target comes from
applying another method to the same scene: a reconstructed 3D model, a neural radiance field or a depth map. A known target is
ground truth, such as ground-truth classifier labels.

The filings also describe, as a non-limiting objective, selecting probes to maximise
information gain about the scene, written `I(S;Y)`: the mutual information between scene variables and the recorded
output.

Under the proposed protocol the protocol digest, the committed record of a run's configuration, would carry the label source and the estimator
in use, so a perception run would state how it was trained; the historical experiments left no such record.

<a id="reactors"></a>
## 4. Across the reactor spectrum

The filings describe the Limager for the reactor configurations they define. A reactor is the optional
physical medium between the emitted probes and the detected responses. With a linear or identity reactor the Limager is simply an
active sensor. Forgery resistance is not the objective at that operating point.

The same convolution-bundle format, meters and protocol logging still apply. A convolution bundle is the project's term for the
joint, time-ordered record of what was emitted and what was observed, and a meter is a declared statistic or evaluator, learned or classical, that decides whether a capture matches
the committed controls. That record is what makes a perception run auditable to the extent of what it commits, controls, emissions and readings (the historical experiments left no such record), and, as described, it would let one instrument support
the perception, verification and rendering regimes on one record format.

In Filing 1's direct coupling the reactor and the scene may share one optical path. The emitted light passes through the reactor
to the scene and returns through it to the detector, so the reactor's response is read in line with the scene's. With a reactor in
the path the output at any moment depends on four things. They are what the controller emitted, what the scene did to the light, what the reactor did to
the light, and what the reactor remembers over a declared effective memory horizon. The filing's rationale is that the reactor's
transform depends on its state and history and may be impractical to reproduce faithfully by digital simulation without reproducing
the full physical complexity. That is a stated rationale for the difficulty of reproducing the recorded interaction under declared
conditions. No measurement of that difficulty is reported here. On the filing's account a forgery would have to match the combined response under the
declared controls, meter and bounds.

In the filing's witness mesh, surrounding Reality Kernel modules read timing structure in one another's signals and in the shared
scene over bounded-latency paths. The filing calls this mutual analogue timestamping: the timestamp is carried by physical behaviour rather than by
trust in a single clock.

<a id="status"></a>
## 5. Status

The digital Truth Beam, at truthbeam.com, is the demonstrated, recomputable verification instance. The Limager is the
perception regime of the same Reality Kernel architecture, described and enabled in the filings and not demonstrated; its early training is an author's report with no published record.

<a id="see-also"></a>
See also
[The Reality Kernel](reality-kernel.html) · the apparatus and formalism.

[Regimes](regimes.html) · the three objectives.

[Truth Beam](truth-beam.html) · the verification regime.

[Reality Transform](reality-transform.html) · the controllable-rendering regime.

[truthbeam.com](https://truthbeam.com) · Truth Beam, the demonstrated verification instance.

— BOSUN ⚓

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All of the technology described here is patent pending. Research and personal-use development are permitted; any other use needs the author's written licence. The statement of 9 September 2026, clarified on 10 September 2026, is on [the LICENSE page](https://poliebotics.com/LICENSE.html).

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