Lensless light-field imaging using LMI

Abstract

Light-field imaging is widely used in many fields, such as computer vision, graphics, and microscopy imaging, to record high-dimensional light information for abundant visual perception. However, light-field imaging systems generally have high system complexity and limited resolution. Over the last decades, lensless imaging systems have attracted tremendous attention to alleviate the restrictions of lens-based architectures. Despite their advantages, lensless light-field imaging introduces significant errors in light-field reconstruction. This paper introduces a novel, to our knowledge, light field moment imaging-based lensless imaging system (LMI-LIS) aiming to improve the quality of light-field reconstruction. The proposed approach first uses light field moment imaging (LMI) with a sinc angular distribution model of the light field to extract the encoded information of the scene for each sub-aperture area. Meanwhile, the corresponding sub-aperture point spread function is segmented from the system point spread function. Finally, sub-aperture images of the scene are reconstructed separately for each sub-aperture area. To evaluate the light-field reconstruction performance, the imaging quality and angular consistency of different lensless light-filed imaging methods are compared through digital refocusing, epipolar plane image, peak signal-to-noise ratio, and structural similarity index. Furthermore, the effectiveness of the proposed methodology is verified using experimental results and theoretical analysis. It is demonstrated that lensless light-field imaging using LMI and the sinc model of the angular distribution achieves high-quality sub-aperture images.