Improved Patch-based View Rendering for Focused Plenoptic Cameras with Extended Depth-of-Field

This paper proposes a patch-based framework to improve view rendering from light fields captured by focused plenoptic cameras with extended depth-of-field. A three-step approach is performed to minimise discontinuities across neighbouring patches and to maximise the information captured from different types of micro-lens. Firstly, the useful patch size of each micro-image is determined to limit the contribution of low light intensity regions into the rendered images. Secondly, anisotropic inpainting is applied to smooth the discontinuities between neighbouring patches. Thirdly, a multi-focus image fusion algorithm is used to efficiently combine the information captured by the different types of micro-lens comprising plenoptic cameras with extended depth-of-field. Significant improvements are obtained in the rendered views, by reducing visible discontinuities between adjacent micro-images, while at the same time increasing the average sharpness of image content by 20%, measured by the Energy of Laplacian (i.e., a focus metric), in comparison to the conventional rendering approach, which always selects the best focused lens type.