Off-axis aperture camera: 3D shape reconstruction and image restoration

In this paper we present a novel 3D surface and image reconstruction method based on the off-axis aperture camera. The key idea is to change the size or the 3-D location of the aperture of the camera lens so as to extract selected portions of the light field of the scene. We show that this results in an imaging device that blends defocus and stereo information, and present an image formation model that simultaneously captures both phenomena. As this model involves a non trivial deformation of the scene space, we also introduce the concept of scene space rectification and how this helps the reconstruction problem. Finally, we formulate our shape and image reconstruction problem as an energy minimization, and use a gradient flow algorithm to find the solution. Results on both real and synthetic data are shown. ©2008 IEEE.