Light-field imaging is appealing to the mobile devices market because of its capability for intuitive post-capture processing. Acquiring light field (LF) data with high angular, spatial and temporal resolution poses significant challenges, especially with space constraints preventing bulky optics. At the same time, stereo video capture, now available on many consumer devices, can be interpreted as a sparse LF-capture. We explore the application of small baseline stereo videos for reconstructing high fidelity LF videos.We propose a self-supervised learning-based algorithm for LF video reconstruction from stereo video. The self- supervised LF video reconstruction is guided via the geometric information from the individual stereo pairs and the temporal information from the video sequence. LF estimation is further regularized by a low-rank constraint based on layered LF displays. The proposed self-supervised algorithm facilitates advantages such as post-training finetuning on test sequences and variable angular view interpolation and extrapolation. Quantitatively the reconstructed LF videos show higher fidelity than previously proposed unsupervised approaches. We demonstrate our results via LF videos generated from publicly available stereo videos acquired from commercially available stereoscopic cameras. Finally, we demonstrate that our reconstructed LF videos allow applications such as post-capture focus control and region-of-interest (RoI) based focus tracking for videos.

What is the current state-of-the-art for image restoration and enhancement applied to degraded images acquired under less than ideal circumstances? Can the application of such algorithms as a pre-processing step improve image interpretability for manual analysis or automatic visual recognition to classify scene content? While there have been important advances in the area of computational photography to restore or enhance the visual quality of an image, the capabilities of such techniques have not always translated in a useful way to visual recognition tasks. Consequently, there is a pressing need for the development of algorithms that are designed for the joint problem of improving visual appearance and recognition, which will be an enabling factor for the deployment of visual recognition tools in many real-world scenarios. To address this, we introduce the UG$^2$dataset as a large-scale benchmark composed of video imagery captured under challenging conditions, and two enhancement tasks designed to test algorithmic impact on visual quality and automatic object recognition. Furthermore, we propose a set of metrics to evaluate the joint improvement of such tasks as well as individual algorithmic advances, including a novel psychophysics-based evaluation regime for human assessment and a realistic set of quantitative measures for object recognition performance. We introduce six new algorithms for image restoration or enhancement, which were created as part of the IARPA sponsored UG$^2$Challenge workshop held at CVPR 2018. Under the proposed evaluation regime, we present an in-depth analysis of these algorithms and a host of deep learning-based and classic baseline approaches. From the observed results, it is evident that we are in the early days of building a bridge between computational photography and visual recognition, leaving many opportunities for innovation in this area.

Ptychography is an imaging technique which aims to recover the complex-valued exit wavefront of an object from a set of its diffraction pattern magnitudes. Ptychography is one of the most popular techniques for sub-30 nanometer imaging as it does not suffer from the limitations of typical lens based imaging techniques. The object can be reconstructed from the captured diffraction patterns using iterative phase retrieval algorithms. Over time many algorithms have been proposed for iterative reconstruction of the object based on manually derived update rules. In this paper, we adapt automatic differentiation framework to solve practical and complex ptychographic phase retrieval problems and demonstrate its advantages in terms of speed, accuracy, adaptability and generalizability across different scanning techniques.

Fourier ptychography is an imaging technique that overcomes the diffraction limit of conventional cameras with applications in microscopy and long range imaging. Diffraction blur causes resolution loss in both cases. In Fourier ptychography, a coherent light source illuminates an object, which is then imaged from multiple viewpoints. The reconstruction of the object from these set of recordings can be obtained by an iterative phase retrieval algorithm. However, the retrieval process is slow and does not work well under certain conditions. In this paper, we propose a new reconstruction algorithm that is based on convolutional neural networks and demonstrate its advantages in terms of speed and performance.