Self-calibrating depth from refraction

Abstract

In this paper, we introduce a novel method for depth acquisition based on refraction of light. A scene is captured twice by a fixed perspective camera, with the first image captured directly by the camera and the second by placing a transparent medium between the scene and the camera. A depth map of the scene is then recovered from the displacements of scene points in the images. Unlike other existing depth from refraction methods, our method does not require the knowledge of the pose and refractive index of the transparent medium, but can recover them directly from the input images. We hence call our method self-calibrating depth from refraction. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world data are presented, which demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. © 2011 IEEE.