arXiv subjects

Oliver Cossairt

Publications and source records attributed to Oliver Cossairt.

51 records · Page 3Linked to original sources

arXiv2020

Disassemblable Fieldwork CT Scanner Using a 3D-printed Calibration Phantom

The use of computed tomography (CT) imaging has become of increasing interest to academic areas outside of the field of medical imaging and industrial inspection, e.g., to biology and cultural heritage research. The pecularities of these fields, however, sometimes require that objects need to be imaged on-site, e.g., in field-work conditions or in museum collections. Under these circumstances, it is often not possible to use a commercial device and a custom solution is the only viable option. In order to achieve high image quality under adverse conditions, reliable calibration and trajectory reproduction are usually key requirements for any custom CT scanning system. Here, we introduce the construction of a low-cost disassemblable CT scanner that allows calibration even when trajectory reproduction is not possible due to the limitations imposed by the project conditions. Using 3D-printed in-image calibration phantoms, we compute a projection matrix directly from each captured X-ray projection. We describe our method in detail and show successful tomographic reconstructions of several specimen as proof of concept.

eess.IV↗

arXiv2020

Exploiting wavelength diversity for high resolution time-of-flight 3D imaging

State-of-the-art time-of-flight (ToF) based 3D sensors suffer from poor lateral and depth resolutions. In this work, we introduce a novel sensor concept that provides ToF-based 3D measurements of real world objects with depth precisions up to 35 micrometers and point cloud densities at the native sensor-resolutions of state-of-the-art CMOS/CCD cameras (up to several megapixels). Unlike other continuous-wave amplitude-modulated ToF principles, our approach exploits wavelength diversity for an interferometric surface measurement of macroscopic objects with rough or specular surfaces. Based on this principle, we introduce three different embodiments of prototype sensors, exploiting three different sensor architectures.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2020

Intensity interferometry-based 3D imaging

The development of single-photon counting detectors and arrays has made tremendous steps in recent years, not the least because of various new applications in, e.g., LIDAR devices. In this work, a 3D imaging device based on real thermal light intensity interferometry is presented. By using gated SPAD technology, a basic 3D scene is imaged in reasonable measurement time. Compared to conventional approaches, the proposed synchronized photon counting allows using more light modes to enhance 3D ranging performance. Advantages like robustness to atmospheric scattering or autonomy by exploiting external light sources can make this ranging approach interesting for future applications.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2019

Adaptive Image Sampling using Deep Learning and its Application on X-Ray Fluorescence Image Reconstruction

This paper presents an adaptive image sampling algorithm based on Deep Learning (DL). The adaptive sampling mask generation network is jointly trained with an image inpainting network. The sampling rate is controlled in the mask generation network, and a binarization strategy is investigated to make the sampling mask binary. Besides the image sampling and reconstruction application, we show that the proposed adaptive sampling algorithm is able to speed up raster scan processes such as the X-Ray fluorescence (XRF) image scanning process. Recently XRF laboratory-based systems have evolved to lightweight and portable instruments thanks to technological advancements in both X-Ray generation and detection. However, the scanning time of an XRF image is usually long due to the long exposures requires (e.g., $100 μs-1ms$ per point). We propose an XRF image inpainting approach to address the issue of long scanning time, thus speeding up the scanning process while still maintaining the possibility to reconstruct a high quality XRF image. The proposed adaptive image sampling algorithm is applied to the RGB image of the scanning target to generate the sampling mask. The XRF scanner is then driven according to the sampling mask to scan a subset of the total image pixels. Finally, we inpaint the scanned XRF image by fusing the RGB image to reconstruct the full scan XRF image. The experiments show that the proposed adaptive sampling algorithm is able to effectively sample the image and achieve a better reconstruction accuracy than that of the existing methods.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Uncalibrated Deflectometry with a Mobile Device on Extended Specular Surfaces

We introduce a system and methods for the three-dimensional measurement of extended specular surfaces with high surface normal variations. Our system consists only of a mobile hand held device and exploits screen and front camera for Deflectometry-based surface measurements. We demonstrate high quality measurements without the need for an offline calibration procedure. In addition, we develop a multi-view technique to compensate for the small screen of a mobile device so that large surfaces can be densely reconstructed in their entirety. This work is a first step towards developing a self-calibrating Deflectometry procedure capable of taking 3D surface measurements of specular objects in the wild and accessible to users with little to no technical imaging experience.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Event-driven Video Frame Synthesis

Temporal Video Frame Synthesis (TVFS) aims at synthesizing novel frames at timestamps different from existing frames, which has wide applications in video codec, editing and analysis. In this paper, we propose a high framerate TVFS framework which takes hybrid input data from a low-speed frame-based sensor and a high-speed event-based sensor. Compared to frame-based sensors, event-based sensors report brightness changes at very high speed, which may well provide useful spatio-temoral information for high framerate TVFS. In our framework, we first introduce a differentiable forward model to approximate the physical sensing process, fusing the two different modes of data as well as unifying a variety of TVFS tasks, i.e., interpolation, prediction and motion deblur. We leverage autodifferentiation which propagates the gradients of a loss defined on the measured data back to the latent high framerate video. We show results with better performance compared to state-of-the-art. Second, we develop a deep learning-based strategy to enhance the results from the first step, which we refer as a residual "denoising" process. Our trained "denoiser" is beyond Gaussian denoising and shows properties such as contrast enhancement and motion awareness. We show that our framework is capable of handling challenging scenes including both fast motion and strong occlusions.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2019

Privacy-Preserving Action Recognition using Coded Aperture Videos

The risk of unauthorized remote access of streaming video from networked cameras underlines the need for stronger privacy safeguards. We propose a lens-free coded aperture camera system for human action recognition that is privacy-preserving. While coded aperture systems exist, we believe ours is the first system designed for action recognition without the need for image restoration as an intermediate step. Action recognition is done using a deep network that takes in as input, non-invertible motion features between pairs of frames computed using phase correlation and log-polar transformation. Phase correlation encodes translation while the log polar transformation encodes in-plane rotation and scaling. We show that the translation features are independent of the coded aperture design, as long as its spectral response within the bandwidth has no zeros. Stacking motion features computed on frames at multiple different strides in the video can improve accuracy. Preliminary results on simulated data based on a subset of the UCF and NTU datasets are promising. We also describe our prototype lens-free coded aperture camera system, and results for real captured videos are mixed.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2018

Computational multifocal microscopy

Despite recent advances, high performance single-shot 3D microscopy remains an elusive task. By introducing designed diffractive optical elements (DOEs), one is capable of converting a microscope into a 3D "kaleidoscope", in which case the snapshot image consists of an array of tiles and each tile focuses on different depths. However, the acquired multifocal microscopic (MFM) image suffers from multiple sources of degradation, which prevents MFM from further applications. We propose a unifying computational framework which simplifies the imaging system and achieves 3D reconstruction via computation. Our optical configuration omits chromatic correction grating and redesigns the multifocal grating to enlarge the tracking area. Our proposed setup features only one single grating in addition to a regular microscope. The aberration correction, along with Poisson and background denoising, are incorporated in our deconvolution-based fully-automated algorithm, which requires no empirical parameter-tuning. In experiments, we achieve the spatial resolutions of $0.35$um (lateral) and $0.5$um (axial), which are comparable to the resolution that can be achieved with confocal deconvolution microscopy. We demonstrate a 3D video of moving bacteria recorded at $25$ frames per second using our proposed computational multifocal microscopy technique.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2018

3D Snapshot Microscopy of Extended Objects

Volumetric biological imaging often involves compromising high temporal resolution at the expense of high spatial resolution when popular scanning methods are used to capture 3D information. We introduce an integrated experimental and image reconstruction method for capturing dynamic 3D fluorescent extended objects as a series of synchronously measured 3D snapshots taken at the frame rate of the imaging camera. We employ multifocal microscopy (MFM) to simultaneously image at 25 focal planes and process this depth-encoded image to recover the 3D structure of extended objects, such as bacteria, using a sparsity-based reconstruction approach. The combined experimental and computational method produces image quality similar to confocal microscopy in a fraction of the acquisition time. In addition, our computational image reconstruction approach allows a simplified MFM optical design by correcting aberrations using the measured response to point sources. This "compressive" MFM acquisition and reconstruction method, where an image volume with roughly 8 million voxels is recovered from a single 1-megapixel captured image, enables straightforward study of dynamic processes in 3D, and as a simultaneous snapshot advances the state of the art in dynamic 3D microscopy.

physics.ins-det↗

arXiv2018

Stretchcam: Zooming Using Thin, Elastic Optics

Stretchcam is a thin camera with a lens capable of zooming with small actuations. In our design, an elastic lens array is placed on top of a sparse, rigid array of pixels. This lens array is then stretched using a small mechanical motion in order to change the field of view of the system. We present in this paper the characterization of such a system and simulations which demonstrate the capabilities of stretchcam. We follow this with the presentation of images captured from a prototype device of the proposed design. Our prototype system is able to achieve 1.5 times zoom when the scene is only 300 mm away with only a 3% change of the lens array's original length.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2017

Photometric Stereo by UV-Induced Fluorescence to Detect Protrusions on Georgia O'Keeffe's Paintings

A significant number of oil paintings produced by Georgia O'Keeffe (1887-1986) show surface protrusions of varying width, up to several hundreds of microns. These protrusions are similar to those described in the art conservation literature as metallic soaps. Since the presence of these protrusions raises questions about the state of conservation and long-term prospects for deterioration of these artworks, a 3D-imaging technique, photometric stereo using ultraviolet illumination, was developed for the long-term monitoring of the surface-shape of the protrusions and the surrounding paint. Because the UV fluorescence response of painting materials is isotropic, errors typically caused by non-Lambertian (anisotropic) specularities when using visible reflected light can be avoided providing a more accurate estimation of shape. As an added benefit, fluorescence provides additional contrast information contributing to materials characterization. The developed methodology aims to detect, characterize, and quantify the distribution of micro-protrusions and their development over the surface of entire artworks. Combined with a set of analytical in-situ techniques, and computational tools, this approach constitutes a novel methodology to investigate the selective distribution of protrusions in correlation with the composition of painting materials at the macro-scale. While focused on O'Keeffe's paintings as a case study, we expect the proposed approach to have broader significance by providing a non-invasive protocol to the conservation community to probe topological changes for any relatively flat painted surface of an artwork, and more specifically to monitor the dynamic formation of protrusions, in relation to paint composition and modifications of environmental conditions, loans, exhibitions and storage over the long-term.

cs.GR↗

arXiv2016

Subsampled Phase Retrieval for On-chip Lensless Holographic Video

On-chip holographic video is a convenient way to monitor biological samples simultaneously at high spatial resolution and over a wide field-of-view. However, due to the limited readout rate of digital detector arrays, one often faces a tradeoff between the per-frame pixel count and frame rate of the captured video. In this report, we propose a subsampled phase retrieval (SPR) algorithm to overcome the spatial-temporal trade-off in holographic video. Compared to traditional phase retrieval approaches, our SPR algorithm uses over an order of magnitude less pixel measurements while maintaining suitable reconstruction quality. We use an on-chip holographic video setup with pixel sub-sampling to experimentally demonstrate a factor of 5.5 increase in sensor frame rate while monitoring the in vivo movement of Peranema microorganisms.

physics.optics↗

arXiv2016

Compressive Holographic Video

Compressed sensing has been discussed separately in spatial and temporal domains. Compressive holography has been introduced as a method that allows 3D tomographic reconstruction at different depths from a single 2D image. Coded exposure is a temporal compressed sensing method for high speed video acquisition. In this work, we combine compressive holography and coded exposure techniques and extend the discussion to 4D reconstruction in space and time from one coded captured image. In our prototype, digital in-line holography was used for imaging macroscopic, fast moving objects. The pixel-wise temporal modulation was implemented by a digital micromirror device. In this paper we demonstrate $10\times$ temporal super resolution with multiple depths recovery from a single image. Two examples are presented for the purpose of recording subtle vibrations and tracking small particles within 5 ms.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2015

Toward Long Distance, Sub-diffraction Imaging Using Coherent Camera Arrays

In this work, we propose using camera arrays coupled with coherent illumination as an effective method of improving spatial resolution in long distance images by a factor of ten and beyond. Recent advances in ptychography have demonstrated that one can image beyond the diffraction limit of the objective lens in a microscope. We demonstrate a similar imaging system to image beyond the diffraction limit in long range imaging. We emulate a camera array with a single camera attached to an X-Y translation stage. We show that an appropriate phase retrieval based reconstruction algorithm can be used to effectively recover the lost high resolution details from the multiple low resolution acquired images. We analyze the effects of noise, required degree of image overlap, and the effect of increasing synthetic aperture size on the reconstructed image quality. We show that coherent camera arrays have the potential to greatly improve imaging performance. Our simulations show resolution gains of 10x and more are achievable. Furthermore, experimental results from our proof-of-concept systems show resolution gains of 4x-7x for real scenes. Finally, we introduce and analyze in simulation a new strategy to capture macroscopic Fourier Ptychography images in a single snapshot, albeit using a camera array.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2014

A Framework for the Analysis of Computational Imaging Systems with Practical Applications

Over the last decade, a number of Computational Imaging (CI) systems have been proposed for tasks such as motion deblurring, defocus deblurring and multispectral imaging. These techniques increase the amount of light reaching the sensor via multiplexing and then undo the deleterious effects of multiplexing by appropriate reconstruction algorithms. Given the widespread appeal and the considerable enthusiasm generated by these techniques, a detailed performance analysis of the benefits conferred by this approach is important. Unfortunately, a detailed analysis of CI has proven to be a challenging problem because performance depends equally on three components: (1) the optical multiplexing, (2) the noise characteristics of the sensor, and (3) the reconstruction algorithm. A few recent papers have performed analysis taking multiplexing and noise characteristics into account. However, analysis of CI systems under state-of-the-art reconstruction algorithms, most of which exploit signal prior models, has proven to be unwieldy. In this paper, we present a comprehensive analysis framework incorporating all three components. In order to perform this analysis, we model the signal priors using a Gaussian Mixture Model (GMM). A GMM prior confers two unique characteristics. Firstly, GMM satisfies the universal approximation property which says that any prior density function can be approximated to any fidelity using a GMM with appropriate number of mixtures. Secondly, a GMM prior lends itself to analytical tractability allowing us to derive simple expressions for the `minimum mean square error' (MMSE), which we use as a metric to characterize the performance of CI systems. We use our framework to analyze several previously proposed CI techniques, giving conclusive answer to the question: `How much performance gain is due to use of a signal prior and how much is due to multiplexing?

cs.CV↗