Depth and all-in-focus imaging by a multi-line-scan light-field camera

We present a multi-line-scan light-field image acquisition and processing system designed for 2.5/3-D inspection of fine surface structures in industrial environments. The acquired three-dimensional light field is composed of multiple observations of an object viewed from different angles. The acquisition system consists of an area-scan camera that allows for a small number of sensor lines to be extracted at high frame rates, and a mechanism for transporting an inspected object at a constant speed and direction. During acquisition, an object is moved orthogonally to the camera's optical axis as well as the orientation of the sensor lines and a predefined subset of lines is read out from the sensor at each time step. This allows for the construction of so-called epipolar plane images (EPIs) and subsequent EPI-based depth estimation. We compare several approaches based on testing a set of slope hypotheses in the EPI domain. Hypotheses are derived from block matching, namely the sum of absolute differences, modified sum of absolute differences, normalized cross correlation, census transform, and modified census transform. Results for depth estimation and all-in-focus image generation are presented for synthetic and real data. (C) 2014 SPIE and IS&T