Parallax Tolerant Light Field Stitching for Hand-held Plenoptic Cameras

Light field (LF) stitching is a potential solution to improve the field of view (FOV) for hand-held plenoptic cameras. Existing LF stitching methods cannot provide accurate registration for scenes with large depth variation. In this paper, a novel LF stitching method is proposed to handle parallax in the LFs more flexibly and accurately. First, a depth layer map (DLM) is proposed to guarantee adequate feature points on each depth layer. For the regions of nondeterministic depth, superpixel layer map (SLM) is proposed based on LF spatial correlation analysis to refine the depth layer assignments. Then, DLM-SLM-based LF registration is proposed to derive the location dependent homography transforms accurately and to warp LFs to its corresponding position without parallax interference. 4D graph-cut is further applied to fuse the registration results for higher LF spatial continuity and angular continuity. Horizontal, vertical and multi-LF stitching are tested for different scenes, which demonstrates the superior performance provided by the proposed method in terms of subjective quality of the stitched LFs, epipolar plane image consistency in the stitched LF, and perspective-averaged correlation between the stitched LF and the input LFs.