Light field extraction from a conventional camera

Abstract

This paper presents a single-shot light field (LF) acquisition method using a conventional camera. The proposed method does not require any modification in the camera design and instead involves an offline calibration process. The calibration step involves the estimation of the point spread function (PSF) for different perspectives at all sampled depths. PSF relates perspective image captured with a narrow aperture opening to the central image captured with wider aperture opening containing multiple perspectives of the same scene superimposed on each other. During LF extraction, different perspective images are obtained by deconvolving the wide aperture input image with the set of PSFs estimated in the offline calibration phase. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method generates high angular and spatial resolution LF.