The pervert's dream has come true.

A Japanese company, Yamada Denshi, has made a new mobile phone gadget that can turn camera phones into X-ray specs that can see through clothes, report British and Japanese media.

The £100 (Rs 8,400) attachment is available on the Internet and can be mounted on high-end cellphones.

The company had originally designed these gadgets to help people take pictures at night, but voyeurs have found a new use for them.

The 'X-ray mobile camera attachment' allows Peeping Toms to see through clothes -- skirts, trousers, shirts and blouses -- and is said to be particularly effective on dark bikinis.

The cameras give users a high-end function like 'night vision' by picking up on heat radiation to create outline pictures. Because bodies are hotter than clothes, the pictures produce an image of the body without the clothes, thus making these cameras a voyeur's delight.

The gadget, which has since been dubbed 'pervert filter' by the media, can also be effectively used with high-end camera phones with powerful zooms and autofocus.

In Japan, the gadget is widely fitted to the Vodafone V602-SH handset. Mobile giant Vodafone is thus extremely agitated over this development, calling it 'the abuse of mobile-phone mounted cameras.'

Although the use of these cameras is not illegal, there are some questions being raised about whether taking people's naked photographs amounts to being within the ambit of the law.

The manufacturer of the gadget Yamada Denshi however is noncommittal over the debate. The company admits to the gadgets see-through functions but professes that the technology should be used only for 'academic purposes' and that it finds people taking sneaky photographs 'sickening.'

The 'pervert filter', however, has also led to some arrests in Japan. Newspapers report that in the past four months, two Japanese professors were apprehended for taking hidden camera pictures up their students' skirts.