Learned Large Field-of-View Imaging With Thin-Plate Optics

Yifan Peng*, Qilin Sun*, Xiong Dun*, Gordon Wetzstein, Wolfgang Heidrich, Felix Heide
(*Joint first authors)
ACM Siggraph Aisa, 2019

Abstract
Resources

Schematic of our flat lens imaging system.

Abstract

Typical camera optics consist of a system of individual elements that are designed to compensate for the aberrations of a single lens. Recent computational cameras shift some of this correction task from the optics to post-capture processing, reducing the imaging optics to only a few optical elements. However, these systems only achieve reasonable image quality by limiting the field of view (FOV) to a few degrees -- effectively ignoring severe off-axis aberrations with blur sizes of multiple hundred pixels. In this paper, we propose a lens design and learned reconstruction architecture that lift this limitation and provide an order of magnitude increase in field of view using only a single thin-plate lens element. Specifically, we design a lens to produce spatially shift-invariant point spread functions, over the full FOV, that are tailored to the proposed reconstruction architecture. We achieve this with a mixture PSF, consisting of a peak and and a low-pass component, which provides residual contrast instead of a small spot size as in traditional lens designs. To perform the reconstruction, we train a deep network on captured data from a display lab setup, eliminating the need for manual acquisition of training data in the field. We assess the proposed method in simulation and experimentally with a prototype camera system. We compare our system against existing single-element designs, including an aspherical lens and a pinhole, and we compare against a complex multi-element lens, validating high-quality large field-of-view (i.e. 53 degree) imaging performance using only a single thin-plate element.

Resources

Paper_fullres: [Peng&Sun2019LearnLargeFOV.pdf (~74.9MB)]

Paper_smallPreview: [Peng&Sun2019LearnLargeFOV_smallPreview.pdf (~3.5MB)]

SuppDoc_smallPreview: [Peng&Sun2019LearnLargeFOV_suppSmall.pdf (~1.6MB)]

Code&Data is available on github: [Code&Data]

Citation

  @inproceedings{Peng_Sun2019LearnLargeFOV,
  title={Learned Large Field-of-View Imaging With Thin-Plate Optics},
  author={Peng, Yifan and Sun, Qilin and Dun, Xiong and Wetzstein, Gordon and Heidrich, Wolfgang},
  booktitle={ACM Transactions on Graphics (Proc. SIGGRAPH Asia)},
  volume = {38},
  number = {6},
  year = {2019},
  publisher={ACM} 
  }