Vol. 51, Issue 2, pp. 289-304 (2021)

Abstract

Traditional light field all-in-focus image fusion algorithms are based on the digital refocusing technique. Multi-focused images converted from one single light field image are used to calculate the all-in-focus image and the light field spatial information is used to accomplish the sharpness evaluation. Analyzing the 4D light field from another perspective, an all-in-focus image fusion algorithm based on angular information is presented in this paper. In the proposed method, the 4D light field data are fused directly and a macro-pixel energy difference function based on angular information is established to accomplish the sharpness evaluation. Then the fused 4D data is guided by the dimension increased central sub-aperture image to obtain the refined 4D data. Finally, the all-in-focus image is calculated by integrating the refined 4D light field data. Experimental results show that the fused images calculated by the proposed method have higher visual quality. Quantitative evaluation results also demonstrate the performance of the proposed algorithm. With the light field angular information, the image feature-based index and human perception inspired index of the fused image are improved.