Auto-Tuning Structured Light by Optical Stochastic Gradient Descent

We consider the problem of optimizing the performance of an active imaging system by automatically discovering the illuminations it should use, and the way to decode them. Our approach tackles two seemingly incompatible goals: (1) ''tuning'' the illuminations and decoding algorithm precisely to the devices at hand---to their optical transfer functions, non-linearities, spectral responses, image processing pipelines---and (2) doing so without modeling or calibrating the system; without modeling the scenes of interest; and without prior training data. The key idea is to formulate a stochastic gradient descent (SGD) optimization procedure that puts the actual system in the loop: projecting patterns, capturing images, and calculating the gradient of expected reconstruction error. We apply this idea to structured-light triangulation to ''auto-tune'' several devices---from smartphones and laser projectors to advanced computational cameras. Our experiments show that despite being model-free and automatic, optical SGD can boost system 3D accuracy substantially over state-of-the-art coding schemes.