Reliable Planar Object Pose Estimation in Light Fields From Best Subaperture Camera Pairs

Abstract

A light-field camera can obtain richer information about a scene than a usual camera. This property offers a lot of potential for robot vision. In this paper, we present a method for pose estimation of a planar object with a light-field camera. The light-field camera can be regarded as a set of sub-aperture cameras. Although any combination of them can theoretically be used for the pose estimation, the accuracy depends on the combination. We show that the estimated pose error can be reduced by selecting the best pair of sub-aperture cameras. We have evaluated the accuracy of our approach with real experiments using a light-field camera in front of planar targets held by an industrial manipulator for ground truth comparison.