3-D Scene Reconstruction Using Depth from Defocus and Deep Learning

Depth estimation is becoming increasingly important in computer vision applications. As the commercial industry moves forward with autonomous vehicle research and development, there is a demand for these systems to be able to gauge their 3D surroundings in order to avoid obstacles, and react to threats. This need requires depth estimation systems, and current research in self-driving vehicles now use LIDAR for 3D awareness. However, as LIDAR becomes more prevalent there is the potential for an increased risk of interference between this type of active measurement system on multiple vehicles. Passive methods, on the other hand, do not require the transmission of a signal in order to measure depth. Instead, they estimate the depth by using specific cues in the scene. Previous research, using a Depth from Defocus (DfD) single passive camera system, has shown that an in-focus image and an out-of-focus image can be used to produce a depth measure. This research introduces a new Deep Learning (DL) architecture that is capable of ingesting these image pairs to produce a depth map of the given scene improving both speed and performance over a range of lighting conditions. Compared to the previous state-of-the-art multi-label graph cut algorithms; the new DfD-Net produces a 63.7% and 33.6% improvement in the Normalized Root Mean Square Error (NRMSE) for the darkest and brightest images respectively. In addition to the NRMSE, an image quality metric (Structural Similarity Index (SSIM)) was also used to assess the DfD-Net performance. The DfD-Net produced a 3.6% increase (improvement) and a 2.3% reduction (slight decrease) in the SSIM metric for the darkest and brightest images respectively.