Automatic calibration and simplified decoding pipeline for plenoptic camera

Plenoptic cameras attract extensive attention these days for their unique information acquisition and postcapture processing capability. In prior work, the decoding pipeline of plenoptic cameras mainly consisted of calibration, aligning, slicing, and resampling. Besides, slicing and resampling are performed on a generated grid of projected centers. Such methods consist of a series of processing steps, and the errors from different steps are accumulated. We propose a simplified decoding pipeline for plenoptic cameras. We first propose a coarse-to-fine strategy to calibrate the microlens array accurately and automatically. Then, unlike prior work, we perform slicing and resampling using a nonregular grid of projected centers. Such a strategy avoids using aligning and excludes the dark regions among different microlenses from decoding. Experiments on published datasets and real-world scenes demonstrate the validation of the proposed method.