Reconstructing dense light field from a multi-focus images array

The work presents a novel method for synthesizing a novel view from two sets of differently focused images taken by a sparse camera array for a scene of two approximately constant depths. The proposed method consists of two steps. The first step is a view interpolation to reconstruct an all-focused dense light field of the scene. The second step is to synthesize a novel view by a light-field rendering technique from the reconstructed dense light field. The view interpolation can be achieved simply by linear filters that are designed to convert defocus effects to parallax effects without estimating the depth map of the scene. The proposed method can effectively create a dense array of pin-hole cameras (i.e., all-focused images), so that the final novel view is better than traditional method using a sparse array of cameras. Experimental results on real images from four aligned cameras are shown.