Development of Under-Display Camera (UDC) systems provides a true bezel-less and notch-free viewing experience on smartphones (and TV, laptops, tablets), while allowing images to be captured from the selfie camera embedded underneath. In a typical UDC system, the microstructure of the semi-transparent organic light-emitting diode (OLED) pixel array attenuates and diffracts the incident light on the camera, resulting in significant image quality degradation. Oftentimes, noise, flare, haze, and blur can be observed in UDC images. In this work, we aim to analyze and tackle the aforementioned degradation problems. We define a physics-based image formation model to better understand the degradation. In addition, we utilize one of the world’s first commodity UDC smartphone prototypes to measure the real-world Point Spread Function (PSF) of the UDC system, and provide a model-based data synthesis pipeline to generate realistically degraded images. We specially design a new domain knowledge-enabled Dynamic Skip Connection Network (DISCNet) to restore the UDC images. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our method through extensive experiments on both synthetic and real UDC data. Our physics-based image formation model and proposed DISCNet can provide foundations for further exploration in UDC image restoration, and even for general diffraction artifact removal in a broader sense.1

/pdf/removing-diffraction-image-artifacts-in-under-display-camera-31prrspjy8.pdf

Removing Diffraction Image Artifacts in Under-Display Camera via Dynamic Skip Connection Network

The new trend of full-screen devices encourages us to position a camera behind a screen. Removing the bezel and centralizing the camera under the screen brings larger display-to-body ratio and enhances eye contact in video chat, but also causes image degradation. In this paper, we focus on a newly-defined Under-Display Camera (UDC), as a novel real-world single image restoration problem. First, we take a 4k Transparent OLED (T-OLED) and a phone Pentile OLED (P-OLED) and analyze their optical systems to understand the degradation. Second, we design a novel Monitor-Camera Imaging System (MCIS) for easier real pair data acquisition, and a model-based data synthesizing pipeline to generate UDC data only from display pattern and camera measurements. Finally, we resolve the complicated degradation using learning-based methods. Our model demonstrates a real-time high-quality restoration trained with either real or synthetic data. The presented results and methods provide good practice to apply image restoration to real-world applications.

Image Restoration for Under-Display Camera

The new trend of full-screen devices encourages us to position a camera behind a screen. Removing the bezel and centralizing the camera under the screen brings larger display-to-body ratio and enhances eye contact in video chat, but also causes image degradation. In this paper, we focus on a newly-defined Under-Display Camera (UDC), as a novel real-world single image restoration problem. First, we take a 4k Transparent OLED (T-OLED) and a phone Pentile OLED (P-OLED) and analyze their optical systems to understand the degradation. Second, we design a Monitor-Camera Imaging System (MCIS) for easier real pair data acquisition, and a model-based data synthesizing pipeline to generate Point Spread Function (PSF) and UDC data only from display pattern and camera measurements. Finally, we resolve the complicated degradation using deconvolution-based pipeline and learning-based methods. Our model demonstrates a real-time high-quality restoration. The presented methods and results reveal the promising research values and directions of UDC.

/pdf/image-restoration-for-under-display-camera-464dp2gyt8.pdf

Under-display camera (UDC) technology is essential for full-screen display in smartphones and is achieved by removing the concept of drilling holes on display. However, this causes inevitable image degradation in the form of spatially variant blur and noise because of the opaque display in front of the camera. To address spatially variant blur and noise in UDC images, we propose a novel controllable image restoration algorithm utilizing pixel-wise UDC-specific kernel representation and a noise estimator. The kernel representation is derived from an elaborate optical model that reflects the effect of both normal and oblique light incidence. Also, noise-adaptive learning is introduced to control noise levels, which can be utilized to provide optimal results depending on the user preferences. The experiments showed that the proposed method achieved superior quantitative performance as well as higher perceptual quality on both a real-world dataset and a monitor-based aligned dataset compared to conventional image restoration algorithms.

/pdf/controllable-image-restoration-for-under-display-camera-in-3cf7wrab3l.pdf

Controllable Image Restoration for Under-Display Camera in Smartphones

Developing and integrating advanced image sensors with novel algorithms in camera systems are prevalent with the increasing demand for computational photography and imaging on mobile platforms. However, the lack of high-quality data for research and the rare opportunity for in-depth exchange of views from industry and academia constrain the development of mobile intelligent photography and imaging (MIPI). To bridge the gap, we introduce the first MIPI challenge including five tracks focusing on novel image sensors and imaging algorithms. In this paper, we summarize and review the Under-Display Camera (UDC) Image Restoration track on MIPI 2022. In total, 167 participants were successfully registered, and 19 teams submitted results in the final testing phase. The developed solutions in this challenge achieved state-of-the-art performance on Under-Display Camera Image Restoration. A detailed description of all models developed in this challenge is provided in this paper. More details of this challenge and the link to the dataset can be found at https://github.com/mipi-challenge/MIPI2022.

MIPI 2022 Challenge on Under-Display Camera Image Restoration: Methods and Results

This paper is the report of the first Under-Display Camera (UDC) image restoration challenge in conjunction with the RLQ workshop at ECCV 2020. The challenge is based on a newly-collected database of Under-Display Camera. The challenge tracks correspond to two types of display: a 4k Transparent OLED (T-OLED) and a phone Pentile OLED (P-OLED). Along with about 150 teams registered the challenge, eight and nine teams submitted the results during the testing phase for each track. The results in the paper are state-of-the-art restoration performance of Under-Display Camera Restoration. Datasets and paper are available at https://yzhouas.github.io/projects/UDC/udc.html.

UDC 2020 Challenge on Image Restoration of Under-Display Camera: Methods and Results

This paper is the report of the first Under-Display Camera (UDC) image restoration challenge in conjunction with the RLQ workshop at ECCV 2020. The challenge is based on a newly-collected database of Under-Display Camera. The challenge tracks correspond to two types of display: a 4k Transparent OLED (T-OLED) and a phone Pentile OLED (P-OLED). Along with about 150 teams registered the challenge, eight and nine teams submitted the results during the testing phase for each track. The results in the paper are state-of-the-art restoration performance of Under-Display Camera Restoration. Datasets and paper are available at this https URL.

Deep learning models have achieved significant performance on image restoration task. However, restoring the images with complicated and combined degradation types still remains a challenge. For this purpose, we proposed a dual residual network with channel attention (DRANet) to address complicated degradation in the real world. We further exploit the potential of encoder-decoder structure. To fuse feature more efficiently, we adopt the channel attention module with skip-connections. To better process low- and high-level information, we introduce the dual residual connection into the network architecture. And we explore the effect of multi-level connection to image restoration. Experimental results demonstrate the superiority of our proposed approach over state-of-the-art methods on the UDC T-OLED dataset.

Shichao Nie

Papers

UDC 2020 Challenge on Image Restoration of Under-Display Camera: Methods and Results

UDC 2020 Challenge on Image Restoration of Under-Display Camera: Methods and Results

A Dual Residual Network with Channel Attention for Image Restoration