3D Scene Reconstruction with an Un-calibrated Light Field Camera

This paper is concerned with the problem of multi-view 3D reconstruction with an un-calibrated micro-lens array based light field camera. To acquire 3D Euclidean reconstruction, existing approaches commonly apply the calibration with a checkerboard and motion estimation from static scenes in two steps. Self-calibration is the process of simultaneously estimating intrinsic and extrinsic parameters directly from un-calibrated light fields without the help of a checkerboard. While the self-calibration technique for conventional (pinhole) camera is well understood, how to extend it to light field camera remains a challenging task. This is primarily due to the ultra-small baseline of the light field camera. We propose an effective self-calibration method for a light field camera for automatic metric reconstruction without a laborious pre-calibration process. In contrast to conventional self-calibration, we show how such a self-calibration method can be made numerically stable, by exploiting the regularity and measurement redundancies unique for the light field camera. The proposed method is built upon the derivation of a novel ray-space homography constraint (RSHC) using Plücker parameterization as well as a ray-space infinity homography (RSIH). We also propose a new concept of “rays of the absolute conic (RAC)” defined as a special quadric in 5D projective space P⁵. A set of new equations are established and solved for self-calibration and 3D metric reconstruction specifically designed for a light field camera. We validate the efficacy of the proposed method on both synthetic and real light fields, and have obtained superior results in both accuracy and robustness.