The Application of Preconditioned Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers in Depth from Focal Stack

Post capture refocusing effect in smartphone cameras is achievable by using focal stacks. However, the accuracy of this effect is totally dependent on the combination of the depth layers in the stack. The accuracy of the extended depth of field effect in this application can be improved significantly by computing an accurate depth map which has been an open issue for decades. To tackle this issue, in this paper, a framework is proposed based on Preconditioned Alternating Direction Method of Multipliers (PADMM) for depth from the focal stack and synthetic defocus application. In addition to its ability to provide high structural accuracy and occlusion handling, the optimization function of the proposed method can, in fact, converge faster and better than state of the art methods. The evaluation has been done on 21 sets of focal stacks and the optimization function has been compared against 5 other methods. Preliminary results indicate that the proposed method has a better performance in terms of structural accuracy and optimization in comparison to the current state of the art methods.Comment: 15 pages, 8 figure

Deep Eyes: Binocular Depth-from-Focus on Focal Stack Pairs

Human visual system relies on both binocular stereo cues and monocular focusness cues to gain effective 3D perception. In computer vision, the two problems are traditionally solved in separate tracks. In this paper, we present a unified learning-based technique that simultaneously uses both types of cues for depth inference. Specifically, we use a pair of focal stacks as input to emulate human perception. We first construct a comprehensive focal stack training dataset synthesized by depth-guided light field rendering. We then construct three individual networks: a Focus-Net to extract depth from a single focal stack, a EDoF-Net to obtain the extended depth of field (EDoF) image from the focal stack, and a Stereo-Net to conduct stereo matching. We show how to integrate them into a unified BDfF-Net to obtain high-quality depth maps. Comprehensive experiments show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art in both accuracy and speed and effectively emulates human vision systems

3D differential phase contrast microscopy

We demonstrate 3D phase and absorption recovery from partially coherent intensity images captured with a programmable LED array source. Images are captured through-focus with four different illumination patterns. Using first Born and weak object approximations (WOA), a linear 3D differential phase contrast (DPC) model is derived. The partially coherent transfer functions relate the sample's complex refractive index distribution to intensity measurements at varying defocus. Volumetric reconstruction is achieved by a global FFT-based method, without an intermediate 2D phase retrieval step. Because the illumination is spatially partially coherent, the transverse resolution of the reconstructed field achieves twice the NA of coherent systems and improved axial resolution

Learning Depth from Focus in the Wild

For better photography, most recent commercial cameras including smartphones have either adopted large-aperture lens to collect more light or used a burst mode to take multiple images within short times. These interesting features lead us to examine depth from focus/defocus. In this work, we present a convolutional neural network-based depth estimation from single focal stacks. Our method differs from relevant state-of-the-art works with three unique features. First, our method allows depth maps to be inferred in an end-to-end manner even with image alignment. Second, we propose a sharp region detection module to reduce blur ambiguities in subtle focus changes and weakly texture-less regions. Third, we design an effective downsampling module to ease flows of focal information in feature extractions. In addition, for the generalization of the proposed network, we develop a simulator to realistically reproduce the features of commercial cameras, such as changes in field of view, focal length and principal points. By effectively incorporating these three unique features, our network achieves the top rank in the DDFF 12-Scene benchmark on most metrics. We also demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method on various quantitative evaluations and real-world images taken from various off-the-shelf cameras compared with state-of-the-art methods. Our source code is publicly available at https://github.com/wcy199705/DfFintheWild