Talk Abstract: The lens is one of the most basic components of any machine vision system. The basic operation of a lens is strikingly simple: to gather cones of light from scene points, lying on a plane at a fixed distance from the lens, and bring them into sharp focus on a (planar) sensor. Simultaneously, points that are not on the focus plane are defocused, with a blur that increases as we move away from the focus plane. Despite remarkable advances in lens design and fabrication over the last few centuries, its core principle of increasing light levels while bringing (a part of) a scene in sharp focus has remained unchanged. In this talk, I will introduce the idea of a spatially-selective computational lens, one that can simultaneously focus points on a focal plane array behind it onto different distances. I will showcase its application in the design of novel 3D displays as well as its implications for imaging systems.

Speaker Biography: Aswin C. Sankaranarayanan is a professor in the ECE department at CMU, where he leads the Image Science Lab. His research interests are broadly in computational photography, signal processing and vision. His doctoral research was in the University of Maryland where his dissertation won the distinguished dissertation award from the ECE department in 2009. Aswin is the recipient of best paper awards at SIGGRAPH 2023 and CVPR 2019, the NSF CAREER award in 2017, as well as the Eta Kappa Nu Excellence in Teaching award.