Image enhancement for fluid lens camera based on color correlation.

The novel field of fluid lens cameras introduces unique image processing challenges. Intended for surgical applications, these fluid optics systems have a number of advantages over traditional glass lens systems. These advantages include improved miniaturization and no moving parts while zooming. However, the liquid medium creates two forms of image degradation: image distortion, which warps the image such that straight lines appear curved, and nonuniform color blur, which degrades the image such that certain color planes appear sharper than others. We propose the use of image processing techniques to reduce these degradations. To deal with image warping, we employ a conventional method that models the warping process as a degree-six polynomial in order to invert the effect. For image blur, we propose an adapted perfect reconstruction filter bank that uses high frequency sub-bands of sharp color planes to improve blurred color planes. The algorithm adjusts the number of levels in the decomposition and alters a prefilter based on crude knowledge of the blurring channel characteristics. While this paper primarily considers the use of a sharp green color plane to improve a blurred blue color plane, these methods can be applied to improve the red color plane as well, or more generally adapted to any system with high edge correlation between two images.