PlenoptiCam v1.0: A light-field imaging framework

Light-field cameras play a vital role for rich 3-D information retrieval in narrow range depth sensing applications. The key obstacle in composing light-fields from exposures taken by a plenoptic camera is to computationally calibrate, re-align and rearrange four-dimensional image data. Several attempts have been proposed to enhance the overall image quality by tailoring pipelines dedicated to particular plenoptic cameras and improving the color consistency across viewpoints at the expense of high computational loads. The framework presented herein advances prior outcomes thanks to its cost-effective color equalization from parallax-invariant probability distribution transfers and a novel micro image scale-space analysis for generic camera calibration independent of the lens specifications. Our framework compensates for hot-pixels, resampling artifacts, micro image grid rotations just as vignetting in an innovative way to enable superior quality in sub-aperture image extraction, computational refocusing and Scheimpflug rendering with sub-sampling capabilities. Benchmark comparisons using established image metrics suggest that our proposed pipeline outperforms state-of-the-art tool chains in the majority of cases. The software described in this paper is released under an open-source license offering cross-platform compatibility, few dependencies and a lean graphical user interface to make the reproduction of results and the experimentation with plenoptic camera technology convenient for peer researchers, developers, photographers, data scientists and everyone else working in this field.