High‐precision refocusing method with one interpolation for camera array images

Abstract

Camera array image refocusing can change the in‐focus region so that objects lying on a specified plane are in focus, whereas objects lying off this plane are blurred. Existing refocusing methods for camera array or light field images usually contain two interpolations. Since interpolation brings distortion, especially on the sharp edge in the images, existing methods are not sufficiently precise. In order to improve the quality of the refocusing result, the authors propose a high‐precision method to refocus camera array images. They first back‐project the pixel coordinates to a corresponding location on the focal plane in the world coordinate. Then they reproject the world coordinates to the pixel coordinates by using the parameters of each camera in the array. After that, they align the images with the focal plane by employing interpolation according to the acquired pixel coordinates. Finally, they get the synthetic image refocused on the focal plane by averaging the resulted images. In the proposed method, only one interpolation is used. So that it alleviates the quality degradation of the refocused image compared to the existing methods. Experiments on real‐world scenes (captured by their self‐developed light field devices) demonstrate that their method can yield better results than the existing methods.

Keywords

• precision refocusing method
• interpolation
• camera array image refocusing
• in‐focus region
• specified plane
• refocusing methods