UDC-SIT: A Real-World Dataset for Under-Display Cameras

Under Display Camera (UDC) is a novel imaging system that mounts a digital camera lens beneath a display panel with the panel covering the camera. However, the display panel causes severe degradation to captured images, such as low transmittance, blur, noise, and flare. The restoration of UDC-degraded images is challenging because of the unique luminance and diverse patterns of flares. Existing UDC dataset studies focus on unrealistic or synthetic UDC degradation rather than real-world UDC images. In this paper, we propose a real-world UDC dataset called UDC-SIT. To obtain the non-degraded and UDC-degraded images for the same scene, we propose an image-capturing system and an image alignment technique that exploits discrete Fourier transform (DFT) to align a pair of captured images. UDC-SIT also includes comprehensive annotations missing from other UDC datasets, such as light source, day/night, indoor/outdoor, and flare components (e.g., shimmers, streaks, and glares). We compare UDC-SIT with four existing representative UDC datasets and present the problems with existing UDC datasets. To show UDC-SIT's effectiveness, we compare UDC-SIT and a representative synthetic UDC dataset using four representative learnable image restoration models. The result indicates that the models trained with the synthetic UDC dataset are impractical because the synthetic UDC dataset does not reflect the actual characteristics of UDC-degraded images. UDC-SIT can enable further exploration in the UDC image restoration area and provide better insights into the problem. UDC-SIT is available at: https://github.com/mcrl/UDC-SIT.