Light field superresolution

Abstract

Light field cameras have been recently shown to be very effective in applications such as digital refocusing and 3D reconstruction. In a single snapshot these cameras provide a sample of the light field of a scene by trading off spatial resolution with angular resolution. Current methods produce images at a resolution that is much lower than that of traditional imaging devices. However, by explicitly modeling the image formation process and incorporating priors such as Lambertianity and texture statistics, these types of images can be reconstructed at a higher resolution. We formulate this method in a variational Bayesian framework and perform the reconstruction of both the surface of the scene and the (superresolved) light field. The method is demonstrated on both synthetic and real images captured with our light-field camera prototype.