A Taxonomy and Evaluation of Dense Light Field Depth Estimation Algorithms

This paper presents the results of the depth estimation challenge for dense light fields, which took place at the second workshop on Light Fields for Computer Vision (LF4CV) in conjunction with CVPR 2017. The challenge consisted of submission to a recent benchmark [7], which allows a thorough performance analysis. While individual results are readily available on the benchmark web page http://www.lightfield-analysis.net, we take this opportunity to give a detailed overview of the current participants. Based on the algorithms submitted to our challenge, we develop a taxonomy of light field disparity estimation algorithms and give a report on the current state-ofthe- art. In addition, we include more comparative metrics, and discuss the relative strengths and weaknesses of the algorithms. Thus, we obtain a snapshot of where light field algorithm development stands at the moment and identify aspects with potential for further improvement.