Differentiable Task-Driven Coded Aperture Camera Design with 3D Gaussian Scene Representations

arXiv:2610.28004v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Camera design heavily influences perception task performance, yet cameras are typically designed by domain experts through costly experimentation, in isolation from the tasks they serve. Existing joint-design methods either rely on differentiable simulation limited to pre-captured 2D images, restricting them to optics or image-processing pipeline design, or use non-differentiable camera simulators optimised with derivative-free or reinforcement-learning methods that scale poorly with the number of design parameters. We present a differentiable framework for jointly designing complex camera systems and downstream perception tasks. We use it to design two coded-aperture depth-from-defocus cameras, a monocular and a stereo configuration, by jointly optimising the coded aperture mask, camera parameters, and a depth estimation network end-to-end. Our framework represents scenes with 3D Gaussian Splatting reconstructed from real-world captures, providing a differentiable image formation process for gradient-based optimisation over design spaces intractable for prior differentiable approaches. Results demonstrate that our differentiable method improves over existing coded aperture design and non-differentiable camera design baselines, offering a step forward in automated and principled camera design for autonomous systems.