PlenoptiCam v1.0: A light-field imaging framework

TL;DR

This paper introduces PlenoptiCam v1.0, a versatile, open-source light-field imaging framework that improves calibration, alignment, and rendering quality across various plenoptic cameras using novel analysis and optimal transport-based color equalization.

Contribution

It presents a novel, camera-agnostic calibration method and a cost-effective color transfer technique, enhancing image quality and reducing computational load in light-field processing.

Findings

Outperforms state-of-the-art pipelines in image quality metrics.

Color transfer method surpasses existing transport techniques.

Enables high-quality sub-aperture image extraction and rendering.

Abstract

Light-field cameras play a vital role for rich 3-D information retrieval in narrow range depth sensing applications. The key obstacle in composing light-fields from exposures taken by a plenoptic camera is to computationally calibrate, align and rearrange four-dimensional image data. Several attempts have been proposed to enhance the overall image quality by tailoring pipelines dedicated to particular plenoptic cameras and improving the consistency across viewpoints at the expense of high computational loads. The framework presented herein advances prior outcomes thanks to its novel micro image scale-space analysis for generic camera calibration independent of the lens specifications and its parallax-invariant, cost-effective viewpoint color equalization from optimal transport theory. Artifacts from the sensor and micro lens grid are compensated in an innovative way to enable superior quality in sub-aperture image extraction, computational refocusing and Scheimpflug rendering with sub-sampling capabilities. Benchmark comparisons using established image metrics suggest that our proposed pipeline outperforms state-of-the-art tool chains in the majority of cases. Results from a Wasserstein distance further show that our color transfer outdoes the existing transport methods. Our algorithms are released under an open-source license, offer cross-platform compatibility with few dependencies and different user interfaces. This makes the reproduction of results and experimentation with plenoptic camera technology convenient for peer researchers, developers, photographers, data scientists and others working in this field.