In this study, we propose a high-performance disparity (depth) estimation method using dual-pixel (DP) images with few parameters. Conventional end-to-end deep-learning methods have many parameters but do not fully ex-ploit disparity constraints, which limits their performance. Therefore, we propose a lightweight disparity estimation method based on a completion-based network that explicitly constrains disparity and learns the physical and systemic disparity properties of DP. By modeling the DP-specific dis-parity error parametrically and using it for sampling during training, the network acquires the unique properties of DP and enhances robustness. This learning also allows us to use a common RGB-D dataset for training without a DP dataset, which is labor-intensive to acquire. Further-more, we propose a non-learning-based refinement frame-work that efficiently handles inherent disparity expansion errors by appropriately refining the confidence map of the network output. As a result, the proposed method achieved state-of-the-art results while reducing the overall system size to 1/5 of that of the conventional method, even without using the DP dataset for training, thereby demonstrating its effectiveness. The code and dataset are available on our project site.

This paper proposes a novel polarization sensor structure and network architecture to obtain a high-quality RGB image and polarization information. Conventional polarization sensors can simultaneously acquire RGB images and polarization information, but the polarizers on the sensor degrade the quality of the RGB images. There is a trade-off between the quality of the RGB image and polarization information as fewer polarization pixels reduce the degradation of the RGB image but decrease the resolution of polarization information. Therefore, we propose an approach that resolves the trade-off by sparsely arranging polarization pixels on the sensor and compensating for low-resolution polarization information with higher resolution using the RGB image as a guide. Our proposed network architecture consists of an RGB image refinement network and a polarization information compensation network. We confirmed the superiority of our proposed network in compensating the differential component of polarization intensity by comparing its performance with state-of-the-art methods for similar tasks: depth completion. Furthermore, we confirmed that our approach could simultaneously acquire higher quality RGB images and polarization information than conventional polarization sensors, resolving the tradeoff between the quality of RGB images and polarization information. The baseline code and newly generated real and synthetic large-scale polarization image datasets are available for further research and development.

Color constancy is an essential function in digital photography and a fundamental process for many computer vision applications. Accordingly, many methods have been proposed, and some recent ones have used deep neural networks to handle more complex scenarios. However, both the traditional and latest methods still impose strict assumptions on their target scenes in explicit or implicit ways. This paper shows that the degree of linear polarization dramatically solves the color constancy problem because it allows us to find achromatic pixels stably. Because we only rely on the physics-based polarization model, we significantly reduce the assumptions compared to existing methods. Furthermore, we captured a wide variety of scenes with groundtruth illuminations for evaluation, and the proposed approach achieved state-of-the-art performance with a low computational cost. Additionally, the proposed method can estimate illumination colors from chromatic pixels and manage multi-illumination scenes. Lastly, the evaluation scenes and codes are publicly available to encourage more development in this field.