Advanced light-field refocusing through tomographic modeling of the photographed scene

Abstract

Recently we have shown that light-field photography images can be interpreted as limited-angle cone-beam tomography acquisitions. Here, we use this property to develop a direct-space tomographic refocusing formulation that allows one to refocus both unfocused and focused light-field images. We express the reconstruction as a convex optimization problem, thus enabling the use of various regularization terms to help suppress artifacts, and a wide class of existing advanced tomographic algorithms. This formulation also supports super-resolved reconstructions and the correction of the optical system's limited frequency response (point spread function). We validate this method with numerical and real-world examples.