This work is about a new type of camera that allows to focus sharp everywhere on a sensor for every pixel. Conventional cameras today use a lens, which can only focus on one plane at a time, one depth at a time. For example, if I have a camera and I point at a water bottle in front of me, I focus on that bottle, the background is going to appear blurry, my kitchen there, it's going to be blurry. And if I focus on my kitchen, then the front object here will be blurry. Of course, this is with this current camera that I have with like the large aperture. But that is generally true for cameras when you have a sufficient aperture. The underlying reason for that is because of the depth of field that the lens has. With any conventional cameras today, the focus across the entire sensor is the same. So if you focus at half a meter away, then all the pixels would focus on half a meter away. The focus is a focal plane. This work introduces a new kind of camera that allows you to not just have a global focal plane, but elevate to another dimension. What if we can have that focal plane to adapt to any three-dimensional structures of the scene that you have? For example, the focus is no longer a plane, a flat plane, but it would have a shape that conforms to the scene geometry. Yingsi Qin is currently a fifth year Ph.D. student at Carnegie Mellon University, under the supervision of Aswin Sankaranarayanan and Matthew O'Toole. She is also the first author of this great paper, which was selected among the 13 best papers of ICCV out of more than 11,000 papers submitted. Ahead of her oral and poster presentations this afternoon, Yingsi tells us more about her work. Spatially-Varying Autofocus 4 DAILY ICCV Thursday This interview was conducted before the ICCV 2025 awards were known. Yingsi and her team earned a fabulous Best Paper Honorable Mention Best Paper Hon. Mention
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NTc3NzU=