camera hardware engineers

Abstract: When zooming between dual cameras on smartphones, prominent discontinuities in both geometric perspective and color rendition inevitably degrade the visual experience of users. To address this issue, we introduce the dual-camera smooth zoom (DCSZ) task, aiming to synthesize continuous intermediate frames for fluid zooming. However, directly applying existing video frame interpolation (VFI) models to this task is severely hindered by substantial domain gaps and the practical intractability of capturing real-world continuous ground-truth. To this end, we propose a novel data synthesis framework to generate high-fidelity DCSZ training sequences, named ZoomGS v2. It explicitly decouples geometric and color transformations from 3D scene representation modeling, thereby enabling extensive data generation from easily accessible single-camera 3D scenes. Furthermore, we develop ZoomFI, a specialized VFI network tailored to the DCSZ task, which leverages complementary bidirectional warping for comprehensive dual-camera information fusion. Extensive experiments on test datasets captured using two mobile phones demonstrate that training with the constructed DCSZ data significantly improves the performance of various VFI models. Moreover, ZoomFI achieves state-of-the-art results in both quantitative metrics and visual quality. The datasets, code, and pretrained models are available at https://hitjunjief.github.io/DCSZ-v2

Abstract: Computational compressive imaging, such as single-pixel imaging and lensless imaging, is a promising imaging technique, enabling the reconstruction of objects from under-sampled measurements through compressed sensing algorithms or deep learning methods. However, the demand for electronic computational resources grows rapidly when recovering high-resolution and multi-dimensional images and training neural networks with numerous parameters, which has become a bottleneck for the widespread adoption of this technique. Here, we propose a physics-driven reconstruction framework that formulates imaging inverse problems as Ising models and directly recovers target objects through the self-evolution of non-von Neumann Ising machines toward the ground state of the Hamiltonian. We employ a simulated-annealing-based Ising solver to demonstrate this proof-of-concept by reconstructing objects in both single-pixel imaging and a lensless diffuser camera at sampling rates ranging from 1% to 25%. By further incorporating a foreground-sparsity constraint and a smoothness constraint, the reconstruction quality of our method is comparable to or even better than that of mainstream algorithms. This approach has the potential to substantially reduce the electronic computational burden of inverse reconstruction, paving the way for real-time, low-power computational imaging.

Abstract: Underwater image enhancement (UIE) aims to restore visibility, color fidelity, and structural detail from images degraded by wavelength-dependent attenuation and backscatter. State-of-the-art UIE methods often rely on large backbones and dense image-to-image prediction, limiting their practicality for edge deployment. Moreover, operating entirely in a single color space couples degradation estimation with luminance and chroma correction. To address these challenges, we propose PIC-UIE, a lightweight predictor--executor framework that predicts image-adaptive corrections from a fixed $256\times256$ RGB thumbnail and applies them to the native-resolution input in the YCbCr color space. The predictor produces seven outputs, organized into spatial correction, nonlinear luminance and coupled chroma mapping, and image-level color calibration. A depth map regularizes the transmission proxy during training, whereas inference uses only the RGB input. With 9,486 parameters and 0.094 GFLOPs at $256\times256$, PIC-UIE achieves 24.137 dB PSNR and 0.9216 SSIM on UIEB-90 and 21.320 dB PSNR on zero-shot LSUI. It further processes native 4K images at 55.0 FPS under the comparison protocol. These results show that structured correction prediction provides an effective and practical alternative to dense RGB reconstruction for underwater image enhancement.