Chihiro Tsutake

Kei Suzuki, Chihiro Tsutake, Keita Takahashi et al.

Compressing the sign information of discrete cosine transform (DCT) coefficients is an intractable problem in image coding schemes due to the equiprobable characteristics of the signs. To overcome this difficulty, we propose an efficient compression method for the sign information called "sign retrieval." This method is inspired by phase retrieval, which is a classical signal restoration problem of finding the phase information of discrete Fourier transform coefficients from their magnitudes. The sign information of all DCT coefficients is excluded from a bitstream at the encoder and is complemented at the decoder through our sign retrieval method. We show through experiments that our method outperforms previous ones in terms of the bit amount for the signs and computation cost. Our method, implemented in Python language, is available from https://github.com/ctsutake/dsr.

Ryoya Mizuno, Keita Takahashi, Michitaka Yoshida et al.

We propose a method for compressively acquiring a dynamic light field (a 5-D volume) through a single-shot coded image (a 2-D measurement). We designed an imaging model that synchronously applies aperture coding and pixel-wise exposure coding within a single exposure time. This coding scheme enables us to effectively embed the original information into a single observed image. The observed image is then fed to a convolutional neural network (CNN) for light-field reconstruction, which is jointly trained with the camera-side coding patterns. We also developed a hardware prototype to capture a real 3-D scene moving over time. We succeeded in acquiring a dynamic light field with 5x5 viewpoints over 4 temporal sub-frames (100 views in total) from a single observed image. Repeating capture and reconstruction processes over time, we can acquire a dynamic light field at 4x the frame rate of the camera. To our knowledge, our method is the first to achieve a finer temporal resolution than the camera itself in compressive light-field acquisition. Our software is available from our project webpage

Yuya Ishikawa, Keita Takahashi, Chihiro Tsutake et al.

We propose a method for reconstructing a continuous light field of a target scene from a single observed image. Our method takes the best of two worlds: joint aperture-exposure coding for compressive light-field acquisition, and a neural radiance field (NeRF) for view synthesis. Joint aperture-exposure coding implemented in a camera enables effective embedding of 3-D scene information into an observed image, but in previous works, it was used only for reconstructing discretized light-field views. NeRF-based neural rendering enables high quality view synthesis of a 3-D scene from continuous viewpoints, but when only a single image is given as the input, it struggles to achieve satisfactory quality. Our method integrates these two techniques into an efficient and end-to-end trainable pipeline. Trained on a wide variety of scenes, our method can reconstruct continuous light fields accurately and efficiently without any test time optimization. To our knowledge, this is the first work to bridge two worlds: camera design for efficiently acquiring 3-D information and neural rendering.

Tomoya Tsuchida, Keita Takahashi, Chihiro Tsutake et al.

We propose Coded-E2LF (coded event to light field), a computational imaging method for acquiring a 4-D light field using a coded aperture and a stationary event-only camera. In a previous work, an imaging system similar to ours was adopted, but both events and intensity images were captured and used for light field reconstruction. In contrast, our method is purely event-based, which relaxes restrictions for hardware implementation. We also introduce several advancements from the previous work that enable us to theoretically support and practically improve light field reconstruction from events alone. In particular, we clarify the key role of a black pattern in aperture coding patterns. We finally implemented our method on real imaging hardware to demonstrate its effectiveness in capturing real 3-D scenes. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to demonstrate that a 4-D light field with pixel-level accuracy can be reconstructed from events alone. Our software and supplementary video are available from our project website.

Shuji Habuchi, Keita Takahashi, Chihiro Tsutake et al.

We propose a computational imaging method for time-efficient light-field acquisition that combines a coded aperture with an event-based camera. Different from the conventional coded-aperture imaging method, our method applies a sequence of coding patterns during a single exposure for an image frame. The parallax information, which is related to the differences in coding patterns, is recorded as events. The image frame and events, all of which are measured in a single exposure, are jointly used to computationally reconstruct a light field. We also designed an algorithm pipeline for our method that is end-to-end trainable on the basis of deep optics and compatible with real camera hardware. We experimentally showed that our method can achieve more accurate reconstruction than several other imaging methods with a single exposure. We also developed a hardware prototype with the potential to complete the measurement on the camera within 22 msec and demonstrated that light fields from real 3-D scenes can be obtained with convincing visual quality. Our software and supplementary video are available from our project website.