Dual Exposure Stereo for Extended Dynamic Range 3D Imaging

Achieving robust stereo 3D imaging under diverse illumination conditions is an importat however challenging task, largely due to the limited dynamic ranges (DRs) of cameras, which are significantly smaller than real world DR. As a result, the accuracy of existing stereo depth estimation methods is often compromised by under- or over-exposed images.In this work, we introduce dual-exposure stereo for extended dynamic range 3D imaging. We develop automatic dual-exposure control method that adjusts the dual exposures, diverging them when the scene DR exceeds the camera DR, thereby providing information about broader DR. From the captured dual-exposure stereo images, we estimate depth by developing a motion-aware dual-exposure stereo depth network.To validate our proposed method, we develop a robot-vision system, collect real-world stereo video datasets, and generate a synthetic dataset. Our approach outperforms traditional exposure control and depth estimation methods.