Designing coded aperture camera based on PCA and NMF for light field acquisition

Abstract

A light field, which is often understood as a set of dense multi-view images, has been utilized in various 2D/3D applications. Efficient light field acquisition using a coded aperture camera is the target problem considered in this paper. Specifically, the entire light field, which consists of many images, should be reconstructed from only a few images that are captured through different aperture patterns. In previous work, this problem has often been discussed from the context of compressed sensing (CS), where sparse representations on a pre-trained dictionary or basis are explored to reconstruct the light field. In contrast, we formulated this problem from the perspective of principal component analysis (PCA) and non-negative matrix factorization (NMF), where only a small number of basis vectors are selected in advance based on the analysis of the training dataset. From this formulation, we derived optimal non-negative aperture patterns and a straight-forward reconstruction algorithm. Even though our method is based on conventional techniques, it has proven to be more accurate and much faster than a state-of-the-art CS-based method.