RECONSTRUCTION OF THREE-DIMENSIONAL IMAGE FROM COMPOUND-EYE IMAGING WITH DEFOCUS USING RAY TRACING

A three-dimensional (3-D) image reconstruction method from a compound-eye image degraded by low-resolution sampling and defocusing is proposed. The 3-D profile of a target object is acquired from parallax images captured by a compound-eye imaging system. The compound-eye imaging is modeled by ray tracing to relate the pixels on the 3-D surface of the object to the pixels of an image sensor. The point-spread function of an optical system is estimated by calculating many optical rays passing through the whole area of the pupil of the optical system. This enables us to take into consideration the influence Of occlusion upon the point-spread function. A high-resolution 3-D image can be reconstructed by minimizing the difference between the captured image and the image calculated by ray tracing of the modeled composed-eye imaging. The validity of the proposed method is verified by computer simulations and preliminary experiments.