A time-of-flight (ToF) depth sensor produces noisy range data due to scene properties such as surface materials and reflectivity. Sensor measurement frequently includes either a saturated or severely noisy depth and effective depth accuracy is far below its ideal specification. In this paper, we propose a hybrid exposure technique for depth imaging in a ToF sensor so to improve the depth quality. Our method automatically determines an optimal depth for each pixel using two exposure conditions. To show that our algorithm is effective, we compare the proposed algorithm with two conventional methods in qualitative and quantitative manners showing the superior performance of proposed algorithm.

Estimating the 3D shape of a scene from differently focused set of images has been a practical approach for 3D reconstruction with color cameras. However, reconstructed depth with existing depth from focus (DFF) methods still suffer from poor quality with textureless and object boundary regions. In this paper, we propose an improved depth estimation based on depth from focus iteratively refining 3D shape from uniformly focused image set (UFIS). We investigated the appearance changes in spatial and frequency domains in iterative manner. In order to achieve sub-frame accuracy in depth estimation, optimal location of focused frame in DFF is estimated by fitting a polynomial curve on the dissimilarity measurements. In order to avoid wrong depth values on texture-less regions we propose to build a confidence map and use it to identify erroneous depth estimations. We evaluated our method on public and our own datasets obtained from different types of devices, such as smartphones, medical, and normal color cameras. Quantitative and qualitative evaluations on various test image sets show promising performance of the proposed method in depth estimation.

Beyond time frame editing in video data, object level video editing is a challenging task; such as object removal in a video or viewpoint changes. These tasks involve dynamic object segmentation, novel view video synthesis and background inpainting. Background inpainting is a task of the reconstruction of unseen regions presented by object removal or viewpoint change. In this paper, we propose a video editing method including foreground object removal background inpainting and novel view video synthesis under challenging conditions such as complex visual pattern, occlusion, overlaid clutter and variation of depth in a moving camera. Our proposed method calculates a weighted confidence score on the basis of normalized difference between observed depth and predicted distance in 3D space. A set of potential points from epipolar lines from neighbor frames are collected, refined, and weighted to select a few number of highly qualified observations to fill the desired region of interest area in the current frame from video. Based on the background inpainting method, novel view video synthesis is conducted with arbitrary viewpoint. Our method is evaluated with both a public dataset and our own video clips and compared with multiple state of the art methods showing a superior performance.

The three-dimensional (3D) symmetry shape plays a critical role in the reconstruction and recognition of 3D objects under occlusion or partial viewpoint observation. Symmetry structure prior is particularly useful in recovering missing or unseen parts of an object. In this work, we propose Sym3DNet for single-view 3D reconstruction, which employs a three-dimensional reflection symmetry structure prior of an object. More specifically, Sym3DNet includes 2D-to-3D encoder-decoder networks followed by a symmetry fusion step and multi-level perceptual loss. The symmetry fusion step builds flipped and overlapped 3D shapes that are fed to a 3D shape encoder to calculate the multi-level perceptual loss. Perceptual loss calculated in different feature spaces counts on not only voxel-wise shape symmetry but also on the overall global symmetry shape of an object. Experimental evaluations are conducted on both large-scale synthetic 3D data (ShapeNet) and real-world 3D data (Pix3D). The proposed method outperforms state-of-the-art approaches in terms of efficiency and accuracy on both synthetic and real-world datasets. To demonstrate the generalization ability of our approach, we conduct an experiment with unseen category samples of ShapeNet, exhibiting promising reconstruction results as well.