So on my webcam there is a cover but it doesn't fully cover the webcam. So this technology would be able to infer something from the radiance of the light seeping in around the edges?
This is a rendering technique designed for real-time graphics, and it's not applicable to that kind of image analysis. It does what has already been possible with ray tracing, but using an approximation that makes it suitable for real-time graphics.
However, the technique has been used to speed up astrophysics calculations:
