Depth extraction of low-texture region using a light field camera

Abstract

A method is proposed for depth extraction of low-texture region with a light field (LF) camera, which expands the application. Based on the analysis of LF data, it is proven that the depth information can be estimated from a single LF image. Furthermore, as the lenslet LF data can be decoded into a subimages array, and the relationship among subimages is proven to be affine transformation, we used the geometry relationship, which is represented by partition ratio of triangle grids area, to replace the unreliable gray value of low-texture region for stereo matching. In addition, to obtain accurate ratio values, preset points are projected to enrich the texture with a projector, which is convenient and reliable. The proposed method improves the accuracy of the depth extraction obviously at low-texture region compared with the traditional state-of-the-art LF method, and results are validated by experiments.