DUAL-STAGE SYSTEM FOR COMPUTATIONAL PHOTOGRAPHY, AND TECHNIQUE FOR TRAINING SAME

A computational photography system is described herein including a guidance system and a detail enhancement system. The guidance system uses a first neural network that maps an original image provided by an image sensor to a guidance image, which represents a color-corrected and lighting-corrected version of the original image. A combination unit combines the original image and the guidance image to produce a combined image. A detail-enhancement system then uses a second neural network to map the combined image to a predicted image. The predicted image supplements the guidance provided by the first neural network by sharpening details in the original image. A training system is also described herein for training the first and second neural networks. The training system alternates in the data it feeds the second neural network, first using a guidance image as input to the second neural network, and then using a corresponding ground-truth image.