CIF: Small: Occlusion-Based Computational Imaging and Scene Analysis: Theory, Methods and Applications

人类长期以来一直在寻找方法来扩展他们的视觉，听觉和其他感官能力，科学和技术进步也有很长的历史。 这些努力涉及增强现有人类感觉能力的新物理设备（例如，显微镜和频闪观测仪），并且还使用来自人类不能感知的模态的信息（例如，射频波形和X射线）。 今天，我们有能力通过信号处理，在物理和计算上联合操纵这些信息源，其程度越来越高，由此产生的技术正在不同的领域中找到应用。 虽然干扰效应似乎限制了可以提取的信息，但情况不一定如此，正如针孔相机的熟悉示例所示。 受这些例子的启发，该项目以统一的方式开发了这些现象在增强可以从感兴趣的环境中恢复的信息量方面所发挥的作用。潜在的应用包括医学、公共安全、建筑安全系统、自动驾驶汽车安全系统、显微镜和天文学以及虚拟和增强现实系统。拟议的研究是一个高度教育为中心的活动，围绕学生的智力和专业发展的重点，研究调查的几个实例和方面的闭塞为基础的成像问题，包括：干扰现象的分析和优化;开发最佳信息提取和推断感兴趣的环境参数;和调查的盲目的方法，特征不佳的设置。 该研究强调一个共同的分析框架，并利用丰富的工具，从信号处理，统计推断，系统理论和信息理论的集合。这个奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过评估使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准的支持。

Humans have long sought ways to extend their vision, hearing, and other sensory capabilities, and there has been a long history of scientific and technological progress. These efforts have involved new physical devices that enhance existing human sensory capabilities (e.g., microscopes and stroboscopes), and and also the use of information from modalities humans cannot sense (e.g., radio frequency wave-forms and X-rays). Today we have the ability to jointly manipulate these sources of information both physically and computationally, via signal processing, to ever increasing degrees, and the resulting technologies are finding application in diverse domains. While interference effects would appear to limit the information that can be extracted, this need not be the case, as the familiar example of a pinhole camera illustrates. Motivated by such examples, this project develops, in a unified way, the role that such phenomena have to play in enhancing the amount of information that can be recovered from environments of interest. Potential applications include medicine, public safety, building security systems, autonomous vehicle safety systems, microscopy and astronomy, and virtual and augmented reality systems. The proposed research is a highly education-centered activity with a focus around the intellectual and professional development of students.The research investigates several instances and aspects of occlusion-based imaging problems, including: the analysis and optimization of interference phenomena; the development of optimum information extraction and inference of environmental parameters of interest; and investigation of blind methods for poorly characterized settings. The research emphasizes a common framework of analysis, and exploits a rich collection of tools from signal processing, statistical inference, systems theory, and information theory.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.