High-resolution light field reconstruction using a hybrid imaging system.

Abstract

Recently, light field cameras have drawn much attraction for their innovative performance in photographic and scientific applications. However, narrow baselines and constrained spatial resolution of current light field cameras impose restrictions on their usability. Therefore, we design a hybrid imaging system containing a light field camera and a high-resolution digital single lens reflex camera, and these two kinds of cameras share the same optical path with a beam splitter so as to achieve the reconstruction of high-resolution light fields. The high-resolution 4D light fields are reconstructed with a phase-based perspective variation strategy. First, we apply complex steerable pyramid decomposition on the high-resolution image from the digital single lens reflex camera. Then, we perform phase-based perspective-shift processing with the disparity value, which is extracted from the upsampled light field depth map, to create high-resolution synthetic light field images. High-resolution digital refocused images and high-resolution depth maps can be generated in this way. Furthermore, controlling the magnitude of the perspective shift enables us to change the depth of field rendering in the digital refocused images. We show several experimental results to demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.