Occlusion Handling in Depth Estimation of a Scene from a Given Light Field Using a Geodesic Distance and the Principle of Symmetry of the View

Abstract—

The problem of depth estimation of a scene from a given light field can be reduced to the problem of classical stereo matching with the statement that matching pixels in stereo images have the same brightness values. However, this assumption is generally incorrect, given the presence of noise in the images and the different illumination of the left and right images in the stereo pair, as well as the existence of occlusions. In this regard, the luminous flux, representing 80 images pairwise epipolar to the central one, offers a number of advantages, especially in terms of occlusion handling. In this paper, we propose the principle of viewing symmetry: if a pixel of the central image lies in the occlusion zone relative to one of the peripheral images of the light field, then this pixel does not belong to the occlusion zone for an axisymmetric image of the peripheral field. Thus, it is possible to form a robust volume of discrepancy weights relative to the occlusion. As a result, the algorithm proposed in the article significantly improves the result of the scene depth reconstruction. The effectiveness of our approach is demonstrated using the main test database of the light field and comparing it with the best reconstruction algorithms in the efficiency of border recognition and in the speed of calculation.