Enhancing Non-line-of-sight Imaging via Learnable Inverse Kernel and Attention Mechanisms

Recovering information from non-line-of-sight (NLOS) imaging is a computationally-intensive inverse problem. Most physics-based NLOS imaging methods address the complexity of this problem by assuming three-bounce reflections and no self-occlusion. However, these assumptions may break down for objects with large depth variations, preventing physics-based algorithms from accurately reconstructing the details and high-frequency information. On the other hand, while learning-based methods can avoid these assumptions, they may struggle to reconstruct details without specific designs due to the spectral bias of neural networks. To overcome these issues, we propose a novel approach that enhances physics-based NLOS imaging methods by introducing a learnable inverse kernel in the Fourier domain and using an attention mechanism to improve the neural network to learn high-frequency information. Our method is evaluated on publicly available and new synthetic datasets, demonstrating its commendable performance compared to prior physics-based and learning-based methods, especially for objects with large depth variations. Moreover, our approach generalizes well to real data and can be applied to tasks such as classification and depth reconstruction. We will make our code and dataset publicly available: https://sci2020.github.io.