Sensing Increased Image Resolution Using Aperture Masks

Ankit Mohan

  

Xiang Huang

  

Ramesh Raskar

  

Jack Tumblin

Abstract

We present a technique to construct increased-resolution images from multiple photos taken without moving the camera or the sensor. Like other super-resolution techniques, we capture and merge multiple images, but instead of moving the camera sensor by sub-pixel distances for each image, we change masks in the lens aperture and slightly de-focus the lens. The resulting capture system is simpler, and tolerates modest mask registration errors well. We present a theoretical analysis of the camera and image merging method, show both simulated results and actual results from a crudely modified consumer camera, and compare its results to robust 'blind' methods that rely on uncontrolled camera displacements.

NOTE: The figure above is for illustration only. The result shown was constructed using a set of 3x3 photos with nine different aperture masks.

Paper

The paper as it appears in the proceedings of IEEE CVPR 2008.

Supplemental Material

A short presentation (PDF; ~5.2MB) that explains the basic idea behind the technique.

BibTeX Entry

@InProceedings{mohan_08_superres,
  author    = {Ankit Mohan and Xiang Huang and Ramesh Raskar and Jack Tumblin},
  title     = {Sensing Increased Image Resolution Using Aperture Masks},
  booktitle = {IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR)},
  year      = {2008},
}