Masking Light Fields to Remove Partial Occlusion

We address partial occlusion due to objects close to a micro lens-based light field camera. Partial occlusion degrades the quality of the image, and may obscure important details of the background scene. In order to remove the effects of partial occlusion post-capture, previous methods with traditional cameras have required the photographer to capture multiple, precisely registered, images under different settings. The use of a light field camera eliminates this requirement, as the camera simultaneously captures multiple views of the scene, making it possible to remove partial occlusion from a single image captured by a hand-held camera. Relative to past approaches for light field completion, we show significantly better performance for the small viewpoint changes inherent to a handheld light field camera, and avoid the need for time-domain data for occlusion estimation.