Plenoptic Camera Calibration Based on Sub-Aperture Images

Abstract

Accurate and robust calibration methods for plenoptic cameras are necessary due to their increasing popularity as depth estimation devices. Existing calibration methods can be placed in two categories: microlens based and sub-aperture image based. The low pixel-count in the microlenses is a limitation for microlens-based methods. On the other hand, calibrating each sub-aperture image independently leads to misalignments, resulting in poor depth estimates due to the high sensitivity on the baseline and alignment. In this paper we propose a hybrid calibration approach which can calibrate sub-aperture images while taking both main lens and microlens geometric constraints into account. Our model is simple yet effective and offers a high degree of interpretability on the intrinsic/extrinsic parameters of the virtual sub-aperture cameras. The experimental evaluation against existing methods shows that our proposed method leads to more accurate measurements in 3D.