Coded Aperture Light Field Imaging

We propose a method for compressively acquiring a dynamic light field (a 5-D volume) through a single-shot coded image (a 2-D measurement). We designed an imaging model that synchronously applies aperture coding and pixel-wise exposure coding within a single exposure time. This coding scheme enables us to effectively embed the original information into a single observed image. The observed image is then fed to a convolutional neural network (CNN) for light-field reconstruction, which is jointly trained with the camera-side coding patterns. We also developed a hardware prototype to capture a real 3-D scene moving over time. We succeeded in acquiring a dynamic light field with 5x5 viewpoints over 4 temporal sub-frames (100 views in total) from a single observed image. Repeating capture and reconstruction processes over time, we can acquire a dynamic light field at 4x the frame rate of the camera. To our knowledge, our method is the first to achieve a finer temporal resolution than the camera itself in compressive light-field acquisition. 

A follow-up work of CVPR 2022, which is presented at 3DSA 2022. In this work, we extend the reconstruction method so as to accept not a single but a few temporally-successive coded-images as input. We demonstrate that this extension leads to quality improvement of the reconstructed light fields without increasing the network/computational complexities. 

We investigate the problem of compressive acquisition of a dynamic light field. A promising solution for compressive light field acquisition is to use a coded aperture camera, with which an entire light field can be computationally reconstructed from several images captured through differently-coded aperture patterns. With this method, it was assumed that the scene should not move throughout the complete acquisition process, which restricted real applications. In this study, however, we assume that the target scene may change over time, and propose a method for acquiring a dynamic light field (a moving scene) using a coded aperture camera and a convolutional neural network (CNN). To successfully handle scene motions, we develope a new configuration of image observation, called V-shape observation, and trained the CNN using a dynamic-light-field dataset with pseudo motions. Our method is validated through experiments using both a computer-generated scene and a real camera.