Varifocal Multiview Images: Capturing and Visual Tasks

Multiview images have flexible field of view (FoV) but inflexible depth of field (DoF). To overcome the limitation of multiview images on visual tasks, in this paper, we present varifocal multiview (VFMV) images with flexible DoF. VFMV images are captured by focusing a scene on distinct depths by varying focal planes, and each view only focused on one single plane.Therefore, VFMV images contain more information in focal dimension than multiview images, and can provide a rich representation for 3D scene by considering both FoV and DoF. The characteristics of VFMV images are useful for visual tasks to achieve high quality scene representation. Two experiments are conducted to validate the advantages of VFMV images in 4D light field feature detection and 3D reconstruction. Experiment results show that VFMV images can detect more light field features and achieve higher reconstruction quality due to informative focus cues. This work demonstrates that VFMV images have definite advantages over multiview images in visual tasks.