A single-imager, single-lens video camera prototype for 3D imaging

A new method for capturing 3D video from a single imager and lens is introduced. The benefit of this method is that it does not have the calibration and alignment issues associated with binocular 3D video cameras. It also does not require special ranging transmitters and sensors. Because it is a single lens/imager system, it is also less expensive than either the binocular or ranging cameras. Our system outputs a 2D image and associated depth image using the combination of microfluidic lens and Depth from Defocus (DfD) algorithm. The lens is capable of changing the focus to obtain two images at the normal video frame rate. The Depth from Defocus algorithm uses the in focus and out of focus images to infer depth. We performed our experiments on synthetic and on the real aperture CMOS imager with a microfluidic lens. On synthetic images, we found an improvement in mean squared error compared to the literature on a limited test set. On camera images, our research showed that DfD combined with edge detection and segmentation provided subjective improvements in the resulting depth images.