Light Field Imaging in the Restrictive Object Space based on Flexible Angular Plane
This addresses a specific issue in industrial and medical endoscopes, but it is incremental as it adapts existing light field imaging concepts to restrictive spaces.
The paper tackles the problem of light field imaging in restrictive object spaces (ROS), where traditional systems cause severe microlens image distortions, by proposing a flexible angular plane and non-distortion principle, and demonstrates this with a simulated system calibration.
In some applications, the object space of light field imaging system is restrictive, such as industrial and medical endoscopes. If the traditional light field imaging system is used in the restrictive object space (ROS) directly but without any specific considerations, the ROS will lead to severe microlens image distortions and then affects light field decoding, calibration and 3D reconstruction. The light field imaging in restrictive object space (ROS-LF) is complicated but significant. In this paper, we first deduce that the reason of the microlens image deviation is the position variation of the angular plane, then we propose the flexible angular plane for ROS-LF, while in the traditional light field the angular plane always coincides with the main lens plane. Subsequently, we propose the microlens image non-distortion principle for ROS-LF and introduce the ROS-LF imaging principle. We demonstrate that the difference is an aperture constant term between the ROS-LF and traditional light field imaging models. At last, we design a ROS-LF simulated system and calibrate it to verify principles proposed in this paper.