A Refractive Camera for Acquiring Stereo and Super-resolution Images

We propose a novel depth sensing system composed of a single camera, and a transparent plate which is placed in front of the camera and rotates about the optical axis of the camera. The camera takes a sequence of images as the plate rotates, which provide the equivalent of a large number of stereo pairs. Compared with conventional multi-camera stereo systems, the use of a single camera for capturing stereo pairs helps improve the accuracy of detecting correspondences. The availability of the large number of stereo pairs also reduces matching ambiguities, even for objects with low texture. By using both the images and the estimated depth map, we show that the proposed system is also capable of generating super-resolution images. Experimental results on reconstructing 3D structures and recovering highresolution images are presented.