The light field 3D scanner

We present a novel light field structure-from-motion (SfM) framework for reliable 3D object reconstruction. Specifically, we use the light field (LF) camera such as Lytro and Raytrix as a virtual 3D scanner. We move an LF camera around the object and register between multiple LF shots. We show that applying conventional SfM on sub-aperture images is not only expensive but also unreliable due to ultra-small baseline and low image resolution. Instead, our LF-SfM scheme maps ray manifolds across LFs. Specifically, we show how rays passing through a common 3D point transform between two LFs and we develop reliable technique for extracting extrinsic parameters from this ray transform. Next, we apply a new edge-preserving stereo matching technique on individual LFs and conduct LF bundle adjustment to jointly optimize pose and geometry. Comprehensive experiments show our solution outperforms many state-of-the-art passive and even active techniques especially on topologically complex objects.