Improved Depth Estimation for Occlusion Scenes Using a Light-Field Camera

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With the development of light-field imaging technology, depth estimation using light-field cameras has become a hot topic in recent years. Even through many algorithms have achieved good performance for depth estimation using light-field cameras, removing the influence of occlusion, especially multi-occlusion, is still a challenging task. The photo-consistency assumption does not hold in the presence of occlusions, which makes most depth estimation of light-field imaging unreliable. In this article, a novel method to handle complex occlusion in depth estimation of light-field imaging is proposed. The method can effectively identify occluded pixels using a refocusing algorithm, accurately select unoccluded views using the adaptive unoccluded-view identification algorithm, and then improve the depth estimation by computing the cost volumes in the unoccluded views. Experimental results demonstrate the advantages of our proposed algorithm compared with conventional state-of-the art algorithms on both synthetic and real light-field data sets.