Occluded object imaging via optimal camera selection

High performance occluded object imaging in cluttered scenes is a significant challenging task for many computer vision applications. Recently the camera array synthetic aperture imaging is proved to be an effective way to seeing object through occlusion. However, the imaging quality of occluded object is often significantly decreased by the shadows of the foreground occluder. Although some works have been presented to label the foreground occluder via object segmentation or 3D reconstruction, these methods will fail in the case of complicated occluder and severe occlusion. In this paper, we present a novel optimal camera selection algorithm to solve the above problem. The main characteristics of this algorithm include: (1) Instead of synthetic aperture imaging, we formulate the occluded object imaging problem as an optimal camera selection and mosaicking problem. To the best of our knowledge, our proposed method is the first one for occluded object mosaicing. (2) A greedy optimization framework is presented to propagate the visibility information among various depth focus planes. (3) A multiple label energy minimization formulation is designed in each plane to select the optimal camera. The energy is estimated in the synthetic aperture image volume and integrates the multi-view intensity consistency, previous visibility property and camera view smoothness, which is minimized via Graph cuts. We compare our method with the state-of-the-art synthetic aperture imaging algorithms, and extensive experimental results with qualitative and quantitative analysis demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our approach.