Linear view/image restoration for dense light fields

Abstract

Scene refocusing and free viewpoint image reconstruction from a dense light field acquired by a massive camera array or a lens array are actively studied. However, it is difficult to directly integrate acquired information into a light field without defects. For example, actually, a massive camera array hardly works without failure of several cameras, and part of multi-view images are missing. On the other hand, because a lens array consists of very small lenses gathering only limited rays, acquired images themselves are often noisy. This paper proposes simple linear filters achieving view/image restoration to obtain a dense light field robustly in suppressing such defects without block matching used by the conventional approaches of view synthesis and denoising. Experimental results show that the proposed filters can be flexibly designed for various defects based on the relation between a 4D light field and the corresponding 3D multi-focus images.