Reinterpretable cameras are defined by their post-processing capabilities that exceed traditional imaging. We present "SoDaCam" that provides reinterpretable cameras at the granularity of photons, from photon-cubes acquired by single-photon devices. Photon-cubes represent the spatio-temporal detections of photons as a sequence of binary frames, at frame-rates as high as 100 kHz. We show that simple transformations of the photon-cube, or photon-cube projections, provide the functionality of numerous imaging systems including: exposure bracketing, flutter shutter cameras, video compressive systems, event cameras, and even cameras that move during exposure. Our photon-cube projections offer the flexibility of being software-defined constructs that are only limited by what is computable, and shot-noise. We exploit this flexibility to provide new capabilities for the emulated cameras. As an added benefit, our projections provide camera-dependent compression of photon-cubes, which we demonstrate using an implementation of our projections on a novel compute architecture that is designed for single-photon imaging.

We recover high-frequency information encoded in the shadows cast by an object to estimate a hemispherical photograph from the viewpoint of the object, effectively turning objects into cameras. Estimating environment maps is useful for advanced image editing tasks such as relighting, object insertion or removal, and material parameter estimation. Because the problem is ill-posed, recent works in illumination recovery have tackled the problem of low- frequency lighting for object insertion, rely upon specular surface materials, or make use of data-driven methods that are susceptible to hallucination without physically plausible constraints. We incorporate an optimization scheme to update scene parameters that could enable practical capture of real-world scenes. Furthermore, we develop a methodology for evaluating expected recovery performance for different types and shapes of objects.

In this paper we introduce a novel Depth-Aware Video Saliency approach to predict human focus of attention when viewing videos that contain a depth map (RGBD) on a 2D screen. Saliency estimation in this scenario is highly important since in the near future 3D video content will be easily acquired yet hard to display. Despite considerable progress in 3D display technologies, most are still expensive and require special glasses for viewing, so RGBD content is primarily viewed on 2D screens, removing the depth channel from the final viewing experience. We train a generative convolutional neural network that predicts the 2D viewing saliency map for a given frame using the RGBD pixel values and previous fixation estimates in the video. To evaluate the performance of our approach, we present a new comprehensive database of 2D viewing eye-fixation ground-truth for RGBD videos. Our experiments indicate that it is beneficial to integrate depth into video saliency estimates for content that is viewed on a 2D display. We demonstrate that our approach outperforms state-of-the-art methods for video saliency, achieving 15% relative improvement.

Eye alignment to the optical system is very critical in many modern devices, such as for biometrics, gaze tracking, head mounted displays, and health. We show alignment in the context of the most difficult challenge: retinal imaging. Alignment in retinal imaging, even conducted by a physician, is very challenging due to precise alignment requirements and lack of direct user eye gaze control. Self-imaging of the retina is nearly impossible. We frame this problem as a user-interface (UI) challenge. We can create a better UI by controlling the eye box of a projected cue. Our key concept is to exploit the reciprocity, "If you see me, I see you", to develop near eye alignment displays. Two technical aspects are critical: a) tightness of the eye box and (b) the eye box discovery comfort. We demonstrate that previous pupil forming display architectures are not adequate to address alignment in depth. We then analyze two ray-based designs to determine efficacious fixation patterns. These ray based displays and a sequence of user steps allow lateral (x, y) and depth (z) wise alignment to deal with image centering and focus. We show a highly portable prototype and demonstrate the effectiveness through a user study.