Development of high-precision 3D imaging technology using chromatic aberration of only one defocused image pair

Abstract

3D imaging is a visualization of depth and color and can be applied to object recognition and AR/VR. Light field imaging, which is a representative 3D imaging technology, uses a lens array, so the system is complicated and the resolution is low. Therefore, a method of obtaining a light field with a traditional camera has been studied, but a large number of images are required and an additional device for shifting the sensor is required. There is also a problem that the quality of the obtained light field is rather low. To solve these problems, in this paper, I propose high-precision 3D imaging using a pair of defocused images. High-precision depth is obtained by using chromatic aberration. In addition, by synthesizing R, G, and B images, a focal stack with chromatic aberration-corrected is generated, and high-quality light field is reconstructed using depth, enabling high-precision 3D imaging. I design a lens with specific chromatic aberration and verify the improvement of the accuracy of depth sensing. In addition, the quality of the light field reconstructed through the focal stack and depth based on the two images is verified using the no-reference image evaluation model. The depth error of the proposed method is smaller than that of the conventional light field imaging, and the image quality is also improved by 20-40%. The proposed method can be implemented as a compact optical system with one liquid lens, two solid lenses and a color filter, and is suitable for real-time applications.