Multi-Flash Light Field Photography

We present a novel multi-flash light field photography (MFLF) technique that couples a light field camera with a ring of four flash lights to combine the benefits of both imaging systems. The multi-flash photography technique enables reliable detection of occlusion edges at individual subaperture images (light field views) in the light field image. We then separately treat occlusion vs. non-occlusion edges in light field stereo matching. For non-occlusion edge pixels, we conduct correspondence matching and depth-from-focus. For pixels on or near the occlusion boundary, we estimate the shape of the occlusion boundary using a novel Support Vector Machine (SVM) approach. We collect an MFLF dataset of synthetic and real scenes that exhibit strong occlusions. The extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art light field stereo matching methods in accuracy and robustness.