Enhanced depth estimation for hand-held light field cameras

Conventional depth estimation methods are confined by the occluder and homogenous regions in the scene. In this paper, we propose a new depth estimation and enhancement method. The raw depth is calculated from analyzing the Consistency Metric Range (CMR) in the angular patch. Confident depth map is obtained by analyzing the variation of CMR within a neighborhood around the lowest CMR curves. Confident depth points are propagated to the whole image by global optimization with weighted neighborhood smoothness, gradient and second derivative constraints. Finally, depth is enhanced by using weighted median filter. The experimental results demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach in providing much clearer transitions of texture regions and much smoother homogenous regions after depth propagation.