Hand-held light field (LF) cameras have unique advantages in computer vision such as 3D scene reconstruction and depth estimation. However, the related applications are limited by the ultra-small baseline, e.g., leading to the extremely low depth resolution in reconstruction. To solve this problem, we propose to rectify LF to obtain a large baseline. Specifically, the proposed method aligns two LFs captured by two hand-held LF cameras with a random relative pose, and extracts the corresponding row-aligned sub-aperture images (SAIs) to obtain an LF with a large baseline. For an accurate rectification, a method for pose estimation is also proposed, where the relative rotation and translation between the two LF cameras are estimated. The proposed pose estimation minimizes the degree of freedom (DoF) in the LF-point-LF-point correspondence model and explicitly solves this model in a linear way. The proposed pose estimation outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms by providing more accurate results to support rectification. The significantly improved depth resolution in 3D reconstruction demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed LF rectification.
Accurate calibration of intrinsic parameters of the light field (LF) camera is the key issue of many applications, especially of the 3D reconstruction. In this paper, we propose the Sub-Aperture Related Bipartition (SARB) projection model to characterize the LF camera. This projection model is composed with two sets of parameters targeting on center view sub-aperture and relations between sub-apertures. Moreover, we also propose a corner point detection algorithm which fully utilizes the 4D LF information in the raw image. Experimental results have demonstrated the accuracy and robustness of the corner detection method. Both the 2D re-projection errors in the lateral direction and errors in the depth direction are minimized because two sets of parameters in SARB projection model are solved separately.