Perspective effect enhancement for light field refocusing using depth-guided optimization

Abstract

Light field (LF) image can improve perspective effect and immersive experience. It also provides new capabilities such as depth estimation, post-capture refocusing, and 3D modelling among which refocusing is potentially very useful in many applications such as smart phone. This paper addresses a novel depth-guided enhancement of light field images to improve depth contrast. The proposed method is formulated as an optimization problem that can consider not only the desired interdepth contrast constraints of depth map, but also intra-depth luminance intensity contrast and color saturation contrast constraints in each depth layer. Experiment result shows that it outperforms the state-of-the-art methods in its depth contrast and detail preservation in each depth layer. It is observed also that the proposed method can enlarge luminance range by 7~15% and improve color contrast by 3~8%.