Single-Image Depth from Defocus with Coded Aperture and Diffusion Posterior Sampling
This provides a more robust depth estimation method for computer vision applications, though it is incremental as it builds on existing coded-aperture and diffusion techniques.
The paper tackled single-image depth-from-defocus reconstruction by using a learned diffusion prior as regularization in an optimization framework, resulting in higher accuracy and stability, outperforming U-Net baselines and classical methods in experiments.
We propose a single-snapshot depth-from-defocus (DFD) reconstruction method for coded-aperture imaging that replaces hand-crafted priors with a learned diffusion prior used purely as regularization. Our optimization framework enforces measurement consistency via a differentiable forward model while guiding solutions with the diffusion prior in the denoised image domain, yielding higher accuracy and stability than classical optimization. Unlike U-Net-style regressors, our approach requires no paired defocus-RGBD training data and does not tie training to a specific camera configuration. Experiments on comprehensive simulations and a prototype camera demonstrate consistently strong RGBD reconstructions across noise levels, outperforming both U-Net baselines and a classical coded-aperture DFD method.