Robust Hough Transform Based 3D Reconstruction From Circular Light Fields

Alessandro Vianello, Jens Ackermann, Maximilian Diebold, Bernd Jähne; Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR), 2018, pp. 7327-7335

Light-field imaging is based on images taken on a regular grid. Thus, high-quality 3D reconstructions are obtainable by analyzing orientations in epipolar plane images (EPIs). Unfortunately, such data only allows to evaluate one side of the object. Moreover, a constant intensity along each orientation is mandatory for most of the approaches. This paper presents a novel method which allows to reconstruct depth information from data acquired with a circular camera motion, termed circular light fields. With this approach it is possible to determine the full 360 degree view of target objects. Additionally, circular light fields allow retrieving depth from datasets acquired with telecentric lenses, which is not possible with linear light fields. The proposed method finds trajectories of 3D points in the EPIs by means of a modified Hough transform. For this purpose, binary EPI-edge images are used, which not only allow to obtain reliable depth information, but also overcome the limitation of constant intensity along trajectories. Experimental results on synthetic and real datasets demonstrate the quality of the proposed algorithm.