A variational model for intrinsic light field decomposition

Abstract

We present a novel variational model for intrinsic light field decomposition, which is performed on four-dimensional ray space instead of a traditional 2D image. As most existing intrinsic image algorithms are designed for Lambertian objects, their performance suffers when considering scenes which exhibit glossy surfaces. In contrast, the rich structure of the light field with many densely sampled views allows us to cope with non-Lambertian objects by introducing an additional decomposition term that models specularity. Regularization along the epipolar plane images further encourages albedo and shading consistency across views. In evaluations of our method on real-world data sets captured with a Lytro Illum plenoptic camera, we demonstrate the advantages of our approach with respect to intrinsic image decomposition and specular removal.