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

Edge adaptive filtering of depth maps for mobile devices

Abstract. Mobile phone cameras have an almost unlimited depth of field, and therefore the images captured with them have wide areas in focus. When the depth of field is digitally manipulated through image processing, accurate perception of depth in a captured scene is important. Capturing depth data requires advanced imaging methods. In case a stereo lens system is used, depth information is calculated from the disparities between stereo frames. The resulting depth map is often noisy or doesn’t have information for every pixel. Therefore it has to be filtered before it is used for emphasizing depth. Edges must be taken into account in this process to create natural-looking shallow depth of field images. In this study five filtering methods are compared with each other. The main focus is the Fast Bilateral Solver, because of its novelty and high reported quality. Mobile imaging requires fast filtering in uncontrolled environments, so optimizing the processing time of the filters is essential. In the evaluations the depth maps are filtered, and the quality and the speed is determined for every method. The results show that the Fast Bilateral Solver filters the depth maps well, and can handle noisy depth maps better than the other evaluated methods. However, in mobile imaging it is slow and needs further optimization.Reunatietoinen syvyyskarttojen suodatus mobiililaitteilla. Tiivistelmä. Matkapuhelimien kameroissa on lähes rajoittamaton syväterävyysalue, ja siksi niillä otetuissa kuvissa laajat alueet näkyvät tarkennettuina. Digitaalisessa syvyysterävyysalueen muokkauksessa tarvitaan luotettava syvyystieto. Syvyysdatan hankinta vaatii edistyneitä kuvausmenetelmiä. Käytettäessä stereokameroita syvyystieto lasketaan kuvien välisistä dispariteeteista. Tuloksena syntyvä syvyyskartta on usein kohinainen, tai se ei sisällä syvyystietoa joka pikselille. Tästä syystä se on suodatettava ennen käyttöä syvyyden korostamiseen. Tässä prosessissa reunat ovat otettava huomioon, jotta saadaan luotua luonnollisen näköisiä kapean syväterävyysalueen kuvia. Tässä tutkimuksessa verrataan viittä suodatusmenetelmää keskenään. Eniten keskitytään nopeaan bilateraaliseen ratkaisijaan, johtuen sen uutuudesta ja korkeasta tuloksen laadusta. Mobiililaitteella kuvantamisen vaatimuksena on nopea suodatus hallitsemattomissa olosuhteissa, joten suodattimien prosessointiajan optimointi on erittäin tärkeää. Vertailuissa syvyyskuvat suodatetaan ja suodatuksen laatu ja nopeus mitataan jokaiselle menetelmälle. Tulokset osoittavat, että nopea bilateraalinen ratkaisija suodattaa syvyyskarttoja hyvin ja osaa käsitellä kohinaisia syvyyskarttoja paremmin kuin muut tarkastellut menetelmät. Mobiilikuvantamiseen se on kuitenkin hidas ja tarvitsee pidemmälle menevää optimointia

A review of snapshot multidimensional optical imaging: Measuring photon tags in parallel

Multidimensional optical imaging has seen remarkable growth in the past decade. Rather than measuring only the two-dimensional spatial distribution of light, as in conventional photography, multidimensional optical imaging captures light in up to nine dimensions, providing unprecedented information about incident photons’ spatial coordinates, emittance angles, wavelength, time, and polarization. Multidimensional optical imaging can be accomplished either by scanning or parallel acquisition. Compared with scanning-based imagers, parallel acquisition–also dubbed snapshot imaging–has a prominent advantage in maximizing optical throughput, particularly when measuring a datacube of high dimensions. Here, we first categorize snapshot multidimensional imagers based on their acquisition and image reconstruction strategies, then highlight the snapshot advantage in the context of optical throughput, and finally we discuss their state-of-the-art implementations and applications

Recovering three-dimensional shape around a corner using ultrafast time-of-flight imaging

The recovery of objects obscured by scattering is an important goal in imaging and has been approached by exploiting, for example, coherence properties, ballistic photons or penetrating wavelengths. Common methods use scattered light transmitted through an occluding material, although these fail if the occluder is opaque. Light is scattered not only by transmission through objects, but also by multiple reflection from diffuse surfaces in a scene. This reflected light contains information about the scene that becomes mixed by the diffuse reflections before reaching the image sensor. This mixing is difficult to decode using traditional cameras. Here we report the combination of a time-of-flight technique and computational reconstruction algorithms to untangle image information mixed by diffuse reflection. We demonstrate a three-dimensional range camera able to look around a corner using diffusely reflected light that achieves sub-millimetre depth precision and centimetre lateral precision over 40 cm×40 cm×40 cm of hidden space.MIT Media Lab ConsortiumUnited States. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Young Faculty AwardMassachusetts Institute of Technology. Institute for Soldier Nanotechnologies (Contract W911NF-07-D-0004