High-Quality Stereo Image Restoration from Double Refraction

Single-shot monocular birefractive stereo methods have been used for estimating sparse depth from double refraction over edges. They also obtain an ordinary-ray (o-ray) image concurrently or subsequently through additional post-processing of depth densification and deconvolution. However, when an extraordinary-ray (e-ray) image is restored to acquire stereo images, the existing methods suffer from very severe restoration artifacts due to a low signal-to-noise ratio of input e-ray image or depth/deconvolution errors. In this work, we present a novel stereo image restoration network that can restore stereo images directly from a double-refraction image. First, we built a physically faithful birefractive stereo imaging dataset by simulating the double refraction phenomenon with existing RGB-D datasets. Second, we formulated a joint stereo restoration problem that accounts for not only geometric relation between o/e-ray images but also joint optimization of restoring both stereo images. We trained our model with our birefractive image dataset in an end-to-end manner. Our model restores high-quality stereo images directly from double refraction in real-time, enabling high-quality stereo video using a monocular camera. Our method also allows us to estimate dense depth maps from stereo images using a conventional stereo method. We evaluate the performance of our method experimentally and synthetically with the ground truth. Results validate that our stereo image restoration network outperforms the existing methods with high accuracy. We demonstrate several image-editing applications using our high-quality stereo images and dense depth maps.