Continuous depth map reconstruction from light fields

Light field analysis recently received growing interest, since its rich structure information benefits many computer vision tasks. This paper presents a novel method to reconstruct continuous depth maps from light field data. Conventional approaches usually treat depth map reconstruction as an optimization problem with discrete labels. On the contrary, our proposed method can obtain continuous depth maps by solving a linear system, which preserves richer details compared with conventional discrete approaches. Structure tensor is employed to extract raw depth information and corresponding confidence levels from the light field data. We introduce a method to reduce the adverse effect of unreliable local estimations, which helps to get rid of errors in specular areas and edges where depth values are discontinuous. Experiments on both synthetic and real light field data demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method.