Enabling High-Quality In-the-Wild Imaging from Severely Aberrated Metalens Bursts

Metalenses offer nanoscale control of light, enabling ultra-thin, lightweight optics that could revolutionize handheld consumer imaging, and augmented and virtual reality. However, their adoption is hindered by severe chromatic aberrations, light scattering, limited broadband performance, and low optical efficiency. In contrast, burst imaging, widely used in smartphone cameras, enhances handheld photography by reducing noise, improving high-dynamic range (HDR) imaging, and increasing resolution. Building on these insights, we design and prototype a $12,000\times$ thinner metalens compared to conventional compound optical lenses and introduce a multi-image restoration framework for noise, over or under saturation and aberration removal, specifically tailored for handheld metalens cameras. Our framework features a lightweight network, memory efficient burst fusion and adaptive correction techniques to restore high-quality images from extreme degraded metalens captures. We evaluate our framework on a new large-scale metalens dataset and validate its effectiveness with several state-of-the art burst imaging and restoration algorithms.