View Transition based Dual Camera Image Fusion
This addresses image quality enhancement in dual-camera smartphone systems, offering an incremental improvement over existing fusion techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of fusing images from wide-angle and telephoto cameras in smartphones to improve output quality, proposing a view transition method that reduces occlusion area and allows more use of telephoto image pixels, resulting in a significant reduction in occlusion area compared to state-of-the-art methods.
The dual camera system of wide-angle ($\bf{W}$) and telephoto ($\bf{T}$) cameras has been widely adopted by popular phones. In the overlap region, fusing the $\bf{W}$ and $\bf{T}$ images can generate a higher quality image. Related works perform pixel-level motion alignment or high-dimensional feature alignment of the $\bf{T}$ image to the view of the $\bf{W}$ image and then perform image/feature fusion, but the enhancement in occlusion area is ill-posed and can hardly utilize data from $\bf{T}$ images. Our insight is to minimize the occlusion area and thus maximize the use of pixels from $\bf{T}$ images. Instead of insisting on placing the output in the $\bf{W}$ view, we propose a view transition method to transform both $\bf{W}$ and $\bf{T}$ images into a mixed view and then blend them into the output. The transformation ratio is kept small and not apparent to users, and the center area of the output, which has accumulated a sufficient amount of transformation, can directly use the contents from the T view to minimize occlusions. Experimental results show that, in comparison with the SOTA methods, occlusion area is largely reduced by our method and thus more pixels of the $\bf{T}$ image can be used for improving the quality of the output image.