# Digital cameras

Even though optical systems can be very complex, the fundamental ideas can be understood from studying the simplest optical system, which is the thin lens. It has an optical axis passing through the lens center and two focal points placed on opposite sides of the optical axis and equidistant from the lens center.

Any ray entering the lens parallel to the optical axis on one side goes through the focal point on the other side. Similarly, any ray entering the lens from the focal point on one side emerges parallel to optical the axis on the other side.

## Aperture and depth of field

The depth of field (DOF) is the front-to-back region of a photograph in which the image is sharp. The focus plane is the plane on which the objects will look the sharpest. The terms shallow and deep are used to describe the depth of field. Three factors determine depth of field: aperture, distance from the lens, and the focal length of the lens.

The smaller the aperture, the deeper the depth of field. Therefore, a f/16 aperture has a much deeper DOF than a f/2 aperture.

This is a good article about focusing.

## The thin lens equation

1 / f = 1 / do + 1 / di

## Snell’s law

η1 sin θ1 = η2 sin θ2

## Capturing color

Because the photodiodes that make up the sensor are monochrome devices, we need to use color filters. Then we can use three CCDs (one for each of red, green, and blue) or one CCD with a color filter array (CFA), such as the Bayer pattern.

## Gamma encoding

Because the human visual system is more sensitive to variations in darker shades, gamma compression is performed. It reserves more bits to darker shades.

## Issues

Blooming is caused when the photodiodes overflow and contaminate adjacent pixels. A solution is the create overflow wells, but this takes away precious sensor area.

# Time of flight cameras

These cameras send light into the scene and measure how it reflects back to it. Needless to say, they have to sample light in very short time intervals. Using a time counter is not easy as it would require very high frequencies. A better solution is to use phase shift to compute how long the light took to get back to the camera.

Even though time of flight cameras can work at higher frame rates than many consumer grade cameras, they do not have great resolution.

# Infrared cameras

These are also called thermographic cameras. They filter out higher frequencies (such as frequencies in the visible spectrum) in order to measure how hot surfaces are. These cameras are useful to detect animals, perform heat-loss detection, and analyze heat dissipation.

# Color

A color model is a mathematical model describing the way colors can be represented as tuples of numbers, such as triples in RGB or quadruples in CMYK. A color space is a specific organization of colors which allows for reproducible representations of color. It is a particular combination of a color model and a mapping function.

# Dynamic range

The human vision has greater dynamic range than most cameras. One thing that can be done to get images that capture a wider dynamic range is to use multiple low dynamic range pictures, combine their radiance values into a high dynamic range image and use a tone mapping operator in order to get a low dynamic range image which contains more details.

Irradiance can be approximated from pixel values by undoing the gamma transformation, then using the inverse of the camera response curve (a curve which stores - per color channel - the amount of incoming light required to get a certain pixel value) and finally dividing the results by the exposure time.

There are global and local tone mapping algorithms. While global tone mapping algorithms use the same parameters to process all pixels in the image, local tone mapping algorithms might use different parameters depending on the neighboring pixels.

There are displays with higher dynamic range than most consumer screens.

EXIF, or exchangeable image file format, metadata stores information about the camera and the settings used to take the picture.

# Vector differential operators

The ∇, or nabla, is a vector differential operator which takes derivatives of the quantity on which it was applied to.

The gradient is the result of the application of ∇ to a scalar field in order to produce a vector field.

The divergent produces a scalar field from a vector field. It is positive if the vectors it are diverging.

The curl produces a vector field from a vector field. It indicates the tendency of a vector field to circulate around a point.

The Laplacian is the concatenation of the gradient and the divergent. It works as a concavity and peak detector. It is positive on minima and negative on maxima.

# Image compositing

Seamless cloning is a technique which uses the Laplacian operator before solving a minimization problem on the difference of the gradient fields of the original image and the cloned region. It’s based on the fact that humans notice large variations much more easily than small continuous differences.

# Image segmentation

The intelligent scissors method uses information about the gradient of the image to find path between two control points which crosses the minimum number of edges.

# Fourier transforms

There are four Fourier representations.

They map discrete (space) into periodic (time), and continuous (space) into non-periodic (time). The inverses are also true.

That means that a discrete and non-periodic signal will be transformed into continuous and periodic by the Fourier transform.

A non-periodic function can be sen as the limiting case of a periodic one, with its period approaching infinity. It’s fundamental frequency tends to zero. Therefore, we need all frequencies to represent this function.

Only the discrete Fourier transform (DFT) and its inverse can be evaluated exactly in a digital computer.

The DFT by itself cannot prevent aliasing. It is during sampling that whether or not there will be aliasing is determined. Sampling happens before the application of the DFT.

The DFT and its inverse always exist.

One can use the DFT to analyze 2D signals (such as images). It is worth pointing out that the inverse might produce imaginary values due to rounding errors.

# Image restoration

If f(x, y) is an image, letting h(x, y) be a degradation function and n(x, y) be a noise function, then g(x, y) = f(x, y) ∗ h(x, y) + n(x, y) is a possible way to model a degraded version of f(x, y). Image restoration techniques may attempt to obtain f(x, y) from g(x, y).

Even if H(u, v) (the DFT of h(x, y)) is known, recovering F(u, v) may be impossible as N(u, v) is random.

F’(u, v) = F(u, v) + N(u, v) / H(u, v)

If H(u, v) has small values, it may drastically affect the values of F’(u, v) during inverse filtering. This means that inverse filtering is very sensitive to noise.

## Wiener filter

The Wiener filter is a type of filter that attempts to minimize the impact of noise. It minimizes the mean square error between the estimated random process and the desired process.

In case there is no noise, it reduces to inverse filtering.

When N(u, v) and F(u, v) are not known and cannot be estimated, an empirically-chosen constant K is used.

# Coded aperture

A conventional aperture is a depth-dependent low-pass filter. Because the circles of confusion increase with the distance from the point to the focal plane, depth can be estimated based on the size of the blur kernel.

Factorable masks are masks defined as the convolution of a structural component (S) and a hole component (h). S defines the location and the transparency of the mask’s holes and h improves the mask’s light efficiency. These masks generate superimposed image copies, which can then be solved to recover both color and depth from single images based on mask factorization.

Factorization has several advantages, such as simplifying analysis, design, implementation, and deconvolution compared to previous approaches based on optimization.

For more details, the following paper is a relevant source. Fortunato, H. E. and Oliveira, M. M. (2012), Coding Depth through Mask Structure. Computer Graphics Forum, 31: 459-468.

# Deconvolution

Image capture might be modelled as the following convolution.

g = h ∗ f + n


Deconvolution to obtain f from g is a highly ill-posed problem, whose solution requires additional constraints.

This type of deconvolution has several applications in microscopy, photography, and astronomy.

Deconvolution is said to be blind when the impulse response function used in the convolution is not known and non-blind when it is known.

Padding can prevent ringing artifacts at the borders when performing frequency domain deconvolution.

# Edge-aware image processing

Color images can be seen as a 2-D surface embedded in a 5-D space.

An edge-preserving filter can be described as a 5-D spatially-invariant convolution kernel whose response decreases as distances among pixels increase in 5-D.

Convolution in 5-D is usually too slow to be done directly. However, by preserving the distances observed in the 5-D space in a lower-dimensional space, edge-aware filtering can be done more efficiently.

There is a domain transform that preserves geodesic distances on 1-D image manifolds embedded in n-D space. It is show in Eduardo S. L. Gastal and Manuel M. Oliveira. “Domain Transform for Edge-Aware Image and Video Processing”. ACM Transactions on Graphics. Volume 30 (2011), Number 4, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2011, Article 69.

The domain transform scales the signal by a function of its range, in such a way that, by applying a local scaling to each position, a linear filter can work as an n-D filter.

A 2-D domain transform cannot exist in general because it would require mapping a 2-D manifold in n-D to R2.

The proposed 1-D transform can be used to perform high-quality edge-preserving 2-D filtering by iterating 1-D filtering operations.

In order to perform 2-D filtering through the 1-D filter, a few iterations are required. Horizontal and vertical passes are interleaved and the length of the filter support is halved at each iteration.

There are three main filter realizations for doing domain transform filtering.

Normalized convolution. Good for stylization and abstraction: smooths similar regions and sharpens relevant edges.

Interpolated convolution. Good for applications where edge sharpening is not desirable, such as tone mapping, detail manipulation.

Recursive filtering. Good for edge-aware interpolation, such as colorization and recoloring. It propagates information across the whole image.

## Filter separability

A separable filter in the context of image processing can be written as product of two more simple filters. A typical example is a 2-dimensional convolution operation separated into two 1-dimensional filters, which reduces the cost of computing the operator.

One can sample the high-dimensional space at a few points and use this information to interpolate the filter response for all pixels. An important observation is that one can improve filtering performance if the sampling points are on a small number of manifolds adapted to the signal.

There is a technique for high-dimensional filtering with linear cost in the number of pixels and in the dimensionality of the space proposed in Eduardo S. L. Gastal and Manuel M. Oliveira. “Adaptive Manifolds for Real-Time High-Dimensional Filtering”. ACM Transactions on Graphics. Volume 31 (2012), Number 4, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2012, Article 33.

Through this technique one can perform filtering in high-dimensional spaces by creating adaptive manifolds, projecting the signal onto these manifolds, then filtering these projections, and at last integrating them together.

# Image forensics

## Acquisition traces

The use of color filter arrays (CFAs) introduces demosaicing traces (correlation between neighbor pixels). Modifications might also change sensor noise patterns.

## Compression traces

There are compression traces, which can indicate that certain regions of an image have been compressed multiple times.

## Editing traces

Editing traces are lighting traces and geometric traces.

## Lack of standardization

Image forensics is an area that lacks terminology standardization.

# Filtering of non-uniformly sample signals

Some applications are better defined using non-uniform sampling. Through high-order recursive filters, one can obtain practically unlimited control over the filtering kernel.

Recursive filters have several advantages, such as the linear time complexity on the number of samples, their infinite impulse response (IIR), and their straightforward implementation. With recursive filters it is possible to approximate many important filters.

High-order filters can be decomposed into first-order filters through partial-fraction expansion. By applying all first-order filters in parallel and accumulating the results one can obtain the final filtered signal.

# Image downscaling

Some spatial frequencies might not be representable in the downscaled image. Sometimes, this high-frequency information is important and must be preserved.

The key idea of Eduardo S. L. Gastal and Manuel M. Oliveira. “Spectral Remapping for Image Downscaling”. ACM Transactions on Graphics. Volume 36 (2017), Number 4, Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2017, Article 145 is that it is possible to represent high-frequency structured content in downscaled images by spectrally remapping this content, before downscaling, to frequencies representable at the target resolution.

In the proposed method, the image is divided in overlapping patches, which will undergo frequency remapping. After this is done, phase alignment must be performed to prevent visible discontinuities between the remapped patches.