Speaker: Tehreem Fatima (Erasmus+ PhD student)
Polarization is a basic property of light originating from its vectorial nature. Polarization can be used for inspection in industries for quality control such as material classification, shape detection, stress identification and scratch inspection. It can also be used for 3D reconstruction, facial reconstruction, and remote sensing, just to name a few. Typically, a linear filter is mounted in front of an ordinary camera and is rotated to take polarimetric pictures at different angles. Recently, Polarized Filter Array (PFA) cameras have been introduced and PFA camera sensors are fabricated by superimposing a linearly polarized filter array to the underlying focal-plane sensor array. This setup allows us to take four polarimetric images with different angles in a single shot.
High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging techniques aim to increase the range of luminance values captured from a scene. The literature counts many approaches to get HDR images out of low-range camera sensors, however most of them rely on multiple acquisitions producing ghosting effects when moving objects are present. By connecting light polarization to the equivalent exposure time, images from PFA camera can be treated as images taken with different exposure times, which in turn can be used for HDR reconstruction.
In this talk, I will introduce the technology behind PFA camera and how it can be exploited to perform single-shot HDR reconstruction.