Depth profile measurement with lenslet images of the plenoptic camera

• Main Authors: Yang, Peng, Wang, Zhaomin, Zhang, Wei, Zhao, Hongying, Qu, Weijuan, Zhao, Haimeng, Asundi, Anand, Yan, Lei
• Other Authors: School of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: 2018
• Subjects: Depth Profile Measurement; Calibration
• Online Access: https://hdl.handle.net/10356/89160; http://hdl.handle.net/10220/44802
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

An approach for carrying out depth profile measurement of an object with the plenoptic camera is proposed. A single plenoptic image consists of multiple lenslet images. To begin with, these images are processed directly with a refocusing technique to obtain the depth map, which does not need to align and decode the plenoptic image. Then, a linear depth calibration is applied based on the optical structure of the plenoptic camera for depth profile reconstruction. One significant improvement of the proposed method concerns the resolution of the depth map. Unlike the traditional method, our resolution is not limited by the number of microlenses inside the camera, and the depth map can be globally optimized. We validated the method with experiments on depth map reconstruction, depth calibration, and depth profile measurement, with the results indicating that the proposed approach is both efficient and accurate.