Atanas Gotchev

Ihtisham Ali, Sari Peltonen, Atanas Gotchev

A key functional block of visual navigation system for intelligent autonomous vehicles is Loop Closure detection and subsequent relocalisation. State-of-the-Art methods still approach the problem as uni-directional along the direction of the previous motion. As a result, most of the methods fail in the absence of a significantly similar overlap of perspectives. In this study, we propose an approach for bi-directional loop closure. This will, for the first time, provide us with the capability to relocalize to a location even when traveling in the opposite direction, thus significantly reducing long-term odometry drift in the absence of a direct loop. We present a technique to select training data from large datasets in order to make them usable for the bi-directional problem. The data is used to train and validate two different CNN architectures for loop closure detection and subsequent regression of 6-DOF camera pose between the views in an end-to-end manner. The outcome packs a considerable impact and aids significantly to real-world scenarios that do not offer direct loop closure opportunities. We provide a rigorous empirical comparison against other established approaches and evaluate our method on both outdoor and indoor data from the FinnForest dataset and PennCOSYVIO dataset.

Ugur Akpinar, Erdem Sahin, Tina M. Hayward et al.

We present a new computational near-eye display method that addresses the vergence-accommodation conflict problem in stereoscopic displays through accommodation-invariance. Our system integrates a refractive lens eyepiece with a novel wavefront coding diffractive optical element, operating in tandem with a pre-processing convolutional neural network. We employ end-to-end learning to jointly optimize the wavefront-coding optics and the image pre-processing module. To implement this approach, we develop a differentiable retinal image formation model that accounts for limiting aperture and chromatic aberrations introduced by the eye optics. We further integrate the neural transfer function and the contrast sensitivity function into the loss model to account for related perceptual effects. To tackle off-axis distortions, we incorporate position dependency into the pre-processing module. In addition to conducting rigorous analysis based on simulations, we also fabricate the designed diffractive optical element and build a benchtop setup, demonstrating accommodation-invariance for depth ranges of up to four diopters.

Yuan Gao, Robert Bregovic, Atanas Gotchev

The image-based rendering approach using Shearlet Transform (ST) is one of the state-of-the-art Densely-Sampled Light Field (DSLF) reconstruction methods. It reconstructs Epipolar-Plane Images (EPIs) in image domain via an iterative regularization algorithm restoring their coefficients in shearlet domain. Consequently, the ST method tends to be slow because of the time spent on domain transformations for dozens of iterations. To overcome this limitation, this letter proposes a novel self-supervised DSLF reconstruction method, CycleST, which applies ST and cycle consistency to DSLF reconstruction. Specifically, CycleST is composed of an encoder-decoder network and a residual learning strategy that restore the shearlet coefficients of densely-sampled EPIs using EPI reconstruction and cycle consistency losses. Besides, CycleST is a self-supervised approach that can be trained solely on Sparsely-Sampled Light Fields (SSLFs) with small disparity ranges ($\leqslant$ 8 pixels). Experimental results of DSLF reconstruction on SSLFs with large disparity ranges (16 - 32 pixels) from two challenging real-world light field datasets demonstrate the effectiveness and efficiency of the proposed CycleST method. Furthermore, CycleST achieves ~ 9x speedup over ST, at least.

Yuan Gao, Robert Bregovic, Reinhard Koch et al.

The Image-Based Rendering (IBR) approach using Shearlet Transform (ST) is one of the most effective methods for Densely-Sampled Light Field (DSLF) reconstruction. The ST-based DSLF reconstruction typically relies on an iterative thresholding algorithm for Epipolar-Plane Image (EPI) sparse regularization in shearlet domain, involving dozens of transformations between image domain and shearlet domain, which are in general time-consuming. To overcome this limitation, a novel learning-based ST approach, referred to as Deep Residual Shearlet Transform (DRST), is proposed in this paper. Specifically, for an input sparsely-sampled EPI, DRST employs a deep fully Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) to predict the residuals of the shearlet coefficients in shearlet domain in order to reconstruct a densely-sampled EPI in image domain. The DRST network is trained on synthetic Sparsely-Sampled Light Field (SSLF) data only by leveraging elaborately-designed masks. Experimental results on three challenging real-world light field evaluation datasets with varying moderate disparity ranges (8 - 16 pixels) demonstrate the superiority of the proposed learning-based DRST approach over the non-learning-based ST method for DSLF reconstruction. Moreover, DRST provides a 2.4x speedup over ST, at least.

Ugur Akpinar, Erdem Sahin, Monjurul Meem et al.

Depth of field is an important factor of imaging systems that highly affects the quality of the acquired spatial information. Extended depth of field (EDoF) imaging is a challenging ill-posed problem and has been extensively addressed in the literature. We propose a computational imaging approach for EDoF, where we employ wavefront coding via a diffractive optical element (DOE) and we achieve deblurring through a convolutional neural network. Thanks to the end-to-end differentiable modeling of optical image formation and computational post-processing, we jointly optimize the optical design, i.e., DOE, and the deblurring through standard gradient descent methods. Based on the properties of the underlying refractive lens and the desired EDoF range, we provide an analytical expression for the search space of the DOE, which is instrumental in the convergence of the end-to-end network. We achieve superior EDoF imaging performance compared to the state of the art, where we demonstrate results with minimal artifacts in various scenarios, including deep 3D scenes and broadband imaging.

Suren Vagharshakyan, Robert Bregovic, Atanas Gotchev

In this article we develop an image based rendering technique based on light field reconstruction from a limited set of perspective views acquired by cameras. Our approach utilizes sparse representation of epipolar-plane images in a directionally sensitive transform domain, obtained by an adapted discrete shearlet transform. The used iterative thresholding algorithm provides high-quality reconstruction results for relatively big disparities between neighboring views. The generated densely sampled light field of a given 3D scene is thus suitable for all applications which requires light field reconstruction. The proposed algorithm is compared favorably against state of the art depth image based rendering techniques.