No Arabic abstract
Vehicles, search and rescue personnel, and endoscopes use flash lights to locate, identify, and view objects in their surroundings. Here we show the first steps of how all these tasks can be done around corners with consumer cameras. Recent techniques for NLOS imaging using consumer cameras have not been able to both localize and identify the hidden object. We introduce a method that couples traditional geometric understanding and data-driven techniques. To avoid the limitation of large dataset gathering, we train the data-driven models on rendered samples to computationally recover the hidden scene on real data. The method has three independent operating modes: 1) a regression output to localize a hidden object in 2D, 2) an identification output to identify the object type or pose, and 3) a generative network to reconstruct the hidden scene from a new viewpoint. The method is able to localize 12cm wide hidden objects in 2D with 1.7cm accuracy. The method also identifies the hidden object class with 87.7% accuracy (compared to 33.3% random accuracy). This paper also provides an analysis on the distribution of information that encodes the occluded object in the accessible scene. We show that, unlike previously thought, the area that extends beyond the corner is essential for accurate object localization and identification.
In this work, we present a camera configuration for acquiring stereoscopic dark flash images: a simultaneous stereo pair in which one camera is a conventional RGB sensor, but the other camera is sensitive to near-infrared and near-ultraviolet instead of R and B. When paired with a dark flash (i.e., one having near-infrared and near-ultraviolet light, but no visible light) this camera allows us to capture the two images in a flash/no-flash image pair at the same time, all while not disturbing any human subjects or onlookers with a dazzling visible flash. We present a hardware prototype of this camera that approximates an idealized camera, and we present an imaging procedure that let us acquire dark flash stereo pairs that closely resemble those we would get from that idealized camera. We then present a technique for fusing these stereo pairs, first by performing registration and warping, and then by using recent advances in hyperspectral image fusion and deep learning to produce a final image. Because our camera configuration and our data acquisition process allow us to capture true low-noise long exposure RGB images alongside our dark flash stereo pairs, our learned model can be trained end-to-end to produce a fused image that retains the color and tone of a real RGB image while having the low-noise properties of a flash image.
We introduce a neural network-based method to denoise pairs of images taken in quick succession, with and without a flash, in low-light environments. Our goal is to produce a high-quality rendering of the scene that preserves the color and mood from the ambient illumination of the noisy no-flash image, while recovering surface texture and detail revealed by the flash. Our network outputs a gain map and a field of kernels, the latter obtained by linearly mixing elements of a per-image low-rank kernel basis. We first apply the kernel field to the no-flash image, and then multiply the result with the gain map to create the final output. We show our network effectively learns to produce high-quality images by combining a smoothed out estimate of the scenes ambient appearance from the no-flash image, with high-frequency albedo details extracted from the flash input. Our experiments show significant improvements over alternative captures without a flash, and baseline denoisers that use flash no-flash pairs. In particular, our method produces images that are both noise-free and contain accurate ambient colors without the sharp shadows or strong specular highlights visible in the flash image.
Real-world lighting often consists of multiple illuminants with different spectra. Separating and manipulating these illuminants in post-process is a challenging problem that requires either significant manual input or calibrated scene geometry and lighting. In this work, we leverage a flash/no-flash image pair to analyze and edit scene illuminants based on their spectral differences. We derive a novel physics-based relationship between color variations in the observed flash/no-flash intensities and the spectra and surface shading corresponding to individual scene illuminants. Our technique uses this constraint to automatically separate an image into constituent images lit by each illuminant. This separation can be used to support applications like white balancing, lighting editing, and RGB photometric stereo, where we demonstrate results that outperform state-of-the-art techniques on a wide range of images.
Previous image based relighting methods require capturing multiple images to acquire high frequency lighting effect under different lighting conditions, which needs nontrivial effort and may be unrealistic in certain practical use scenarios. While such approaches rely entirely on cleverly sampling the color images under different lighting conditions, little has been done to utilize geometric information that crucially influences the high-frequency features in the images, such as glossy highlight and cast shadow. We therefore propose a framework for image relighting from a single flash photograph with its corresponding depth map using deep learning. By incorporating the depth map, our approach is able to extrapolate realistic high-frequency effects under novel lighting via geometry guided image decomposition from the flashlight image, and predict the cast shadow map from the shadow-encoding transformed depth map. Moreover, the single-image based setup greatly simplifies the data capture process. We experimentally validate the advantage of our geometry guided approach over state-of-the-art image-based approaches in intrinsic image decomposition and image relighting, and also demonstrate our performance on real mobile phone photo examples.
Scene recovery is a fundamental imaging task for several practical applications, e.g., video surveillance and autonomous vehicles, etc. To improve visual quality under different weather/imaging conditions, we propose a real-time light correction method to recover the degraded scenes in the cases of sandstorms, underwater, and haze. The heart of our work is that we propose an intensity projection strategy to estimate the transmission. This strategy is motivated by a straightforward rank-one transmission prior. The complexity of transmission estimation is $O(N)$ where $N$ is the size of the single image. Then we can recover the scene in real-time. Comprehensive experiments on different types of weather/imaging conditions illustrate that our method outperforms competitively several state-of-the-art imaging methods in terms of efficiency and robustness.