Overview

Computational imaging studies how to acquire and reconstruct images when optics or sensors encode scenes indirectly, as in CT and MRI, lensless and single-pixel cameras, hyperspectral systems, event cameras, and photon-limited imaging. Methods range from physics-based inverse optimization and compressed sensing to deep unfolding, self-supervised learning, and diffusion or flow-based generative priors; many also co-design illumination, masks, exposure, or sensor layouts with reconstruction. Researchers assess fidelity, uncertainty, speed, and robustness in settings such as sparse-view tomography, demosaicing, depth estimation, and non-line-of-sight imaging, using both simulations and real hardware. A central tension is that learned priors can fill gaps in measurements but may hallucinate when the forward model or calibration is wrong, while accurate physics, reliable uncertainty estimates, and efficient inference remain challenging.

Latest papers

123 papers15 papers in the last four weeks, up 25% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

Mar 20, 2025

Physically Grounded Monocular Depth via Nanophotonic Wavefront Encoding

Depth foundation models (DFMs) offer strong learned priors for 3D perception from single RGB images but lack physical depth cues, leading to ambiguities in metric scale. We introduce metalenses, an emerging class of ultrathin planar optical elements, as a solution to physically encode missing metric depth cues via nanophotonics. In this paper, we bridge the gap between metalens and DFMs to achieve accurate metric monocular depth sensing. In a single monocular shot, our metalens embeds depth-dependent positional shifts into two polarized optical wavefronts. With an input adaptation strategty, we enable direct fine-tuning that aligns a pretrained DFM with the optical signals. To scale the training data, we further develop a comprehensive simulation pipeline that synthesizes metalens responses from RGB-D datasets, incorporating physical factors to minimize the sim-to-real gap. Experiments demonstrate that this approach outperforms both monocular metric depth estimation and depth-from-defocus baselines, showing an effective pathway for accurate monocular metric depth sensing.
Jan 25, 2025

Leveraging Motion Estimation for Efficient Bayer-Domain Video Convolutional Networks

Existing computer vision pipelines suffer from two efficiency bottlenecks: image signal processors (ISPs) first convert Bayer pixel data to RGB pixel by pixel, and video models repeatedly process temporally redundant frames, leading to high power consumption and latency. In this paper, we propose a novel framework that eliminates the ISP and leverages motion estimation to accelerate video vision tasks directly in the Bayer domain. We introduce Motion Estimation-based Video Convolution (MEVC), which integrates sliding-window motion estimation into each convolutional layer, enabling prediction and residual-based refinement that reduces redundant computations across frames. This design bridges the structural gap between block-based motion estimation and spatial convolution, enabling accurate, low-cost processing. Our end-to-end pipeline supports raw Bayer input and achieves over 70% reduction in FLOPs with minimal accuracy degradation across video semantic segmentation, depth estimation, and object detection benchmarks, using both synthetic Bayer-converted and real Bayer video datasets.
Dec 3, 2024

Filterless Snapshot Hyperspectral Imaging using Guided Patch Diffusion

We consider the problem of reconstructing a HxWx31 hyperspectral image from a H×WH\times W grayscale snapshot measurement that is captured using only a single diffractive lens and a filterless panchromatic photosensor. This problem is severely ill-posed, but we present a model that produces high-quality results in simulation and experiment. We make efficient use of limited training data by creating a conditional denoising diffusion model that operates on small patches in a shift-invariant manner. During inference, we synchronize per-patch hyperspectral predictions using guidance by physical consistency with the system's optical point spread function. Our experiments reveal that the patch size can be as small as the point spread function, with local optical cues being the main source of information about complete spectra. Also, by drawing multiple samples, our model provides per-pixel uncertainty estimates that strongly correlate with reconstruction error.