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 a MFLF dataset of synthetic and real scenes that exhibit strong occlusions. Extensive experiments show that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art light field stereo matching methods in accuracy and robustness.