Depth from defocus (DfD) and stereo matching are two most studied passive depth sensing schemes. The techniques are essentially complementary: DfD can robustly handle repetitive textures that are problematic for stereo matching whereas stereo matching is insensitive to defocus blurs and can handle large depth range. In this paper, we present a unified learning-based technique to conduct hybrid DfD and stereo matching. Our input is image triplets: a stereo pair and a defocused image of one of the stereo views. We first apply depth-guided light field rendering to construct a comprehensive training dataset for such hybrid sensing setups. Next, we adopt the hourglass network architecture to separately conduct depth inference from DfD and stereo. Finally, we exploit different connection methods between the two separate networks for integrating them into a unified solution to produce high fidelity 3D disparity maps. Comprehensive experiments on real and synthetic data show that our new learning-based hybrid 3D sensing technique can significantly improve accuracy and robustness in 3D reconstruction.
In the computational imaging community, there has been a handful of works that aim to combine stereo and DfD. Early approaches @cite_27 @cite_44 use a coarse estimation from DfD to reduce the search space of correspondence matching in stereo. Rajagopalan @cite_31 used a defocused stereo pair to recover depth and restore the all-focus image. Recently, Tao @cite_24 analyzed the variances of the epipolar plane image (EPI) to infer depth: the horizontal variance after vertical integration of the EPI encodes the defocus cue, while vertical variance represents the disparity cue. Both cues are then jointly optimized in a MRF framework. Takeda @cite_37 analyzed the relationship between point spread function and binocular disparity in the frequency domain, and jointly resolved the depth and deblurred the image. Wang @cite_25 presented a hybrid camera system that is composed of two calibrated auxiliary cameras and an uncalibrated main camera. The calibrated cameras were used to infer depth and the main camera provides DfD cues for boundary refinement. Our approach instead leverages the neural network to combine DfD and stereo estimations. To our knowledge, this is the first approach that employs deep learning for stereo and DfD fusion.
@cite_37 @cite_44 @cite_24 @cite_27 @cite_31 @cite_25
2089129849 2115463575 2107882199 2529015851
In this paper we propose a novel depth measurement method by fusing depth from defocus (DFD) and stereo. One of the problems of passive stereo method is the difficulty of finding correct correspondence between images when an object has a repetitive pattern or edges parallel to the epipolar line. On the other hand, the accuracy of DFD method is inherently limited by the effective diameter of the lens. Therefore, we propose the fusion of stereo method and DFD by giving different focus distances for left and right cameras of a stereo camera with coded apertures. Two types of depth cues, defocus and disparity, are naturally integrated by the magnification and phase shift of a single point spread function (PSF) per camera. In this paper we give the proof of the proportional relationship between the diameter of defocus and disparity which makes the calibration easy. We also show the outstanding performance of our method which has both advantages of two depth cues through simulation and actual experiments. A new method for actively recovering depth information using image defocus is demonstrated and shown to support active stereo vision depth recovery by providing monocular depth estimates to guide the positioning of cameras for stereo processing. This active depth-from-defocus approach employs a spatial frequency model for image defocus which incorporates the optical transfer function of the image acquisition system and a maximum likelihood estimator to determine the amount of defocus present in a sequence of two or more images taken from the same pose. This defocus estimate is translated into a measurement of depth and associated uncertainty that is used to control the positioning of a variable baseline stereo camera system. This cooperative arrangement significantly reduces the matching uncertainty of the stereo correspondence process and increases the depth resolution obtainable with an active stereo vision platform. We propose a method for estimating depth from images captured with a real aperture camera by fusing defocus and stereo cues. The idea is to use stereo-based constraints in conjunction with defocusing to obtain improved estimates of depth over those of stereo or defocus alone. The depth map as well as the original image of the scene are modeled as Markov random fields with a smoothness prior, and their estimates are obtained by minimizing a suitable energy function using simulated annealing. The main advantage of the proposed method, despite being computationally less efficient than the standard stereo or DFD method, is simultaneous recovery of depth as well as space-variant restoration of the original focused image of the scene. In this work, we propose a multi-camera system where we combine a main high-quality camera with two low-res auxiliary cameras. The auxiliary cameras are well calibrated and act as a passive depth sensor by generating disparity maps. The main camera has an interchangeable lens and can produce good quality images at high resolution. Our goal is, given the low-res depth map from the auxiliary cameras, generate a depth map from the viewpoint of the main camera. The advantage of our system, compared to other systems such as light-field cameras or RGBD sensors, is the ability to generate a high-resolution color image with a complete depth map, without sacrificing resolution and with minimal auxiliary hardware. Since the main camera has an interchangeable lens, it cannot be calibrated beforehand, and directly applying stereo matching on it and either of the auxiliary cameras often leads to unsatisfactory results. Utilizing both the calibrated cameras at once, we propose a novel approach to better estimate the disparity map of the main camera. Then by combining the defocus cue of the main camera, the disparity map can be further improved. We demonstrate the performance of our algorithm on various scenes.