Time-Efficient Light-Field Acquisition Using Coded Aperture and Events
This addresses the need for faster light-field imaging in computational photography, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing coded-aperture and event-based techniques.
The paper tackles the problem of time-efficient light-field acquisition by combining a coded aperture with an event-based camera, achieving more accurate reconstruction than other single-exposure methods and demonstrating a hardware prototype capable of measurement within 22 msec.
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.