Capturing Procedure

The ZED camera has synchronized dual sensors to capture the two views. Each sensor has a 4M pixels resolution, with large 2 pixels. The sensors are separated by a horizontal distance of 12 cm and have a ground height of about 3.5–4 cm. The lenses are wide angle – all glass ones with a field of view of 90(H) x 60(V) x 110(D) and an f/2.0 aperture. The camera has a depth range of 0.5 to 20m. The camera is mounted on a short tripod and placed on a firm surface (ground level or higher) to capture the scenes. The captures are done with the help of the ZED SDK support environment, which stitches the left and right views into one contiguous frame. Calibration is done using the SDK toolkit prior to capturing data. Camera controls like resolution, frame rate, aspect ratio, brightness, exposure, etc were edited using the software.

The image dataset contains natural scenes captured in the IIT Madras campus. Each scene has been captured under 3-4 different exposure settings, achieved through the SDK controls. All images have been captured in 2K (full HD) resolution. The left and right views, each with resolution of 2208 x 1242, are combined into a single output image with a resolution of 4416 x 1242. The images are frame aligned (any discrepancies corrected in post processing), but there is some motion of the scene objects between the multi-exposure captures, which cannot be ruled out in a natural scene. The video dataset contains short fixed frame videos of still scenes with slight, periodic, traceable motion. All videos have been captured in 1920 x 1080 for each view, at a frame rate of 30 fps. The same scene has been captured under 3-4 different exposures sequentially using the software controls. The frame is undisturbed between the successive video captures, to eliminate any frame misalignment. However, there is slight motion of the objects in the scene, such as the swaying of trees, flowing water, etc. As a result, the multi-exposure videos are not frame-wise identical. These pose new challenges and opportunities to researchers.