Simultaneous active camera array focus plane estimation and occluded moving object imaging

• This is a novel work to solve camera array auto focusing and occluded object imaging simultaneously.
• A unified framework is proposed to achieve seamless interaction between focusing and imaging.
• An optimization algorithm is presented to dynamically estimate the focus plane.
• A visibility analysis is proposed to remove the occluder and improve the imaging quality.

Automatically focusing and seeing occluded moving object in cluttered and complex scene is a significant challenging task for many computer vision applications. In this paper, we present a novel synthetic aperture imaging approach to solve this problem. The unique characteristics of this work include the following: (1) To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first to simultaneously solve camera array auto focusing and occluded moving object imaging problem. (2) A unified framework is designed to achieve seamless interaction between the focusing and imaging modules. (3) In the focusing module, a local and global constraint-based optimization algorithm is presented to dynamically estimate the focus plane of the moving object. (4) In the imaging module, a novel visibility analysis based active synthetic aperture imaging approach is proposed to remove the occluder and significantly improve the quality of occluded object imaging. An active camera array system has been set up and evaluated in challenging indoor and outdoor scenes. Extensive experimental results with qualitative and quantitative analyses demonstrate the superiority of the proposed approach compared with state-of-the-art approaches.