Light field from micro-baseline image pair

We present a novel phase-based approach for reconstructing 4D light field from a micro-baseline stereo pair. Our approach takes advantage of the unique property of complex steerable pyramid filters in micro-baseline stereo. We first introduce a Disparity Assisted Phase based Synthesis (DAPS) strategy that can integrate disparity information into the phase term of a reference image to warp it to its close neighbor views. Based on the DAPS, an “analysis by synthesis” approach is proposed to warp from one of the input binocular images to the other, and iteratively optimize the disparity map to minimize the phase differences between the warped one and the ground truth input. Finally, the densely and regularly spaced, high quality light field images can be reconstructed using the proposed DAPS according to the refined disparity map. Our approach also solves the problems of disparity inconsistency and ringing artifact in available phase-based view synthesis methods. Experimental results demonstrate that our approach substantially improves both the quality of disparity map and light field, compared with the state-of-the-art stereo matching and image based rendering approaches.