Calibrating an unfocused plenoptic camera based on parameters grouping and the light field structure point

Abstract

Accurately calibrating an unfocused plenoptic camera is essential to its applications. Rapid progress has been made in this area in the past decades. In this paper, detailed analysis is first performed toward the state-of-the-art projection model. Based on the analysis, parameters in the projection model are divided into two groups. Then, based on the parameter analysis, a new, to the best of our knowledge, form of the projection model, together with a new image feature light field structure point (LF-structure-point), is proposed. The LF-structure-point provides a completely non-redundant representation of the signal structure of the recorded light field raw data and induces a virtual space, “light field structure space,” which is related to the real physical space by a 3D-to-3D projective transformation. The extracting algorithm of the LF-structure-point is also presented. Finally, based on the 3D-to-3D projective transformation and parameter grouping, a simple two-step calibration method using the LF-structure-point as the input data is then proposed and achieves satisfactory experimental results.