Light Field Flow Estimation Based on Occlusion Detection

Light field cameras have a wide area of applications, such as digital refocusing, scene depth information extraction and 3-D image reconstruction. By recording the energy and direction information of light field, they can well solve many technical problems that cannot be done by conventional cameras. An important feature of light field cameras is that a microlens array is inserted between the sensor and main lens, through which a series of sub-aperture images of different perspectives are formed. Based on this feature and the full-focus image acquisition technique, we propose a light-field optical flow calculation algorithm, which involves both the depth estimation and the occlusion detection and guarantees the edge-preserving property. This algorithm consists of three steps: 1) Computing the dense optical flow field among a group of sub-aperture images; 2) Obtaining a robust depth-estimation by initializing the light-filed optical flow using the linear regression approach and detecting occluded areas using the consistency; 3) Computing an improved light-field depth map by using the edge-preserving algorithm to realize interpolation optimization. The reliability and high accuracy of the proposed approach is validated by experimental results.