Graph-Based Depth Denoising & Dequantization for Point Cloud Enhancement.

A 3D point cloud is typically constructed from depth measurements acquired by sensors at one or more viewpoints. The measurements suffer from both quantization and noise corruption. To improve quality, previous works denoise a point cloud a posteriori after projecting the imperfect depth data onto 3D space. Instead, we enhance depth measurements directly on the sensed images a priori, before synthesizing a 3D point cloud. By enhancing near the physical sensing process, we tailor our optimization to our depth formation model before subsequent processing steps that obscure measurement errors. Specifically, we model depth formation as a combined process of signal-dependent noise addition and non-uniform log-based quantization. The designed model is validated (with parameters fitted) using collected empirical data from a representative depth sensor. To enhance each pixel row in a depth image, we first encode intra-view similarities between available row pixels as edge weights via feature graph learning. We next establish inter-view similarities with another rectified depth image via viewpoint mapping and sparse linear interpolation. This leads to a maximum a posteriori (MAP) graph filtering objective that is convex and differentiable. We minimize the objective efficiently using accelerated gradient descent (AGD), where the optimal step size is approximated via Gershgorin circle theorem (GCT). Experiments show that our method significantly outperformed recent point cloud denoising schemes and state-of-the-art image denoising schemes in two established point cloud quality metrics.

Megapixel photon-counting color imaging using quanta image sensor.

Quanta Image Sensor (QIS) is a single-photon detector designed for extremely low light imaging conditions. Majority of the existing QIS prototypes are monochrome based on single-photon avalanche diodes (SPAD). Passive color imaging has not been demonstrated with single-photon detectors due to the intrinsic difficulty of shrinking the pixel size and increasing the spatial resolution while maintaining acceptable intra-pixel cross-talk. In this paper, we present image reconstruction of the first color QIS with a resolution of 1024 × 1024 pixels, supporting both single-bit and multi-bit photon counting capability. Our color image reconstruction is enabled by a customized joint demosaicing-denoising algorithm, leveraging truncated Poisson statistics andvariance stabilizing transforms. Experimental results of the new sensor and algorithm demonstrate superior color imaging performance for very low-light conditions with a mean exposure of as low as a few photons per pixel in both real and simulated images.