Abstract
In the development of 3D visualization techniques, how to acquire an image along with its depth information is always one of the most interesting problems worthy of research. In order to obtain a 3D image with its depth information in a scene from the 2D images captured from an ordinary camera system, it may not be feasible with the portable devices such as mobile phones and laptops which emphasize low power consumption. The Liquid-Crystal Lens camera developed by Tunable Optix Inc. may provide a new approach to capture the 2D images with low power consumption and also provide the focal cue to reconstruct the depth.There are two main approaches for 3D reconstruction from 2D images’ focal cues. One approach is Depth from Focusing (DFF) and the other is Depth from Defocusing (DFD). DFF has more accuracy, but has to take much more images of a stationary scene. DFD needs fewer images to reconstruct the depth but is more computation expensive.In this thesis, we analyze the characteristics of the LC lens camera system and chose the geometric approach to implement the initial depth estimation. The geometric approach is a DFF method and would be more robust against the intensive noise caused by the LC lens camera system. And then we employ a depth propagation process using optimization to refine the depth map in plain regions of a 2D image. In the experiment, our method can generate rather good 3D visualization results, verified by a DIBR 3D display system.