Quadratic formulation of disparity estimation problem for light-field camera

Newly available light-field (LF) cameras are able to capture several views of a scene simultaneously. These views typically have small parallax, and thus can be easily registered. In this paper we exploit this property of the views captured by the LF camera to formulate disparity estimation problem as a quadratic energy minimization problem. Our problem formulation has three benefits. Firstly, it allows computation of continuous disparity with subpixel accuracy. Secondly it permits recovering disparity of loosely textured objects and ensures that the disparity boundaries are aligned with the object´s boundaries. And, finally, it allows finding the solution very quickly. It takes 15-20s for our non-optimized Matlab code to compute the solution for 25 × 350 × 350 input views.