Disparity estimation from light fields using sheared EPI analysis

Structure tensor analysis on epipolar plane images (EPIs) is a successful approach to estimate disparity from a light field, i.e. a dense set of multi-view images. However, the disparity range allowable for the light field is limited, because the estimation becomes less accurate as the range of disparities become larger. To overcome this limitation, we propose a new method called sheared EPI analysis, where EPIs are sheared before the structure tensor analysis. The results of analysis obtained with different shear values are integrated into a final disparity map. As verified by extensive evaluations on 12 datasets with large disparity ranges, our method is comparably accurate to and much faster than a multi-view stereo method.