title: Multiple-Layer Visibility Propagation-Based Synthetic Aperture Imaging through Occlusion.
abstract: Heavy occlusions in cluttered scenes impose significant challenges to many computer vision applications. Recent light field imaging systems provide new see-through capabilities through synthetic aperture imaging (SAI) to overcome the occlusion problem. Existing synthetic aperture imaging methods, however, emulate focusing at a specific depth layer, but are incapable of producing an all-in-focus see-through image. Alternative in-painting algorithms can generate visually-plausible results, but cannot guarantee the correctness of the results. In this paper, we present a novel depth-free all-in-focus SAI technique based on light field visibility analysis. Specifically, we partition the scene into multiple visibility layers to directly deal with layer-wise occlusion and apply an optimization framework to propagate the visibility information between multiple layers. On each layer, visibility and optimal focus depth estimation is formulated as a multiple-label energy minimization problem. The layer-wise energy integrates all of the visibility masks from its previous layers, multi-view intensity consistency and depth smoothness constraint together. We compare our method with state-of-the-art solutions, and extensive experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness and superiority of our approach.
authors.affiliation: ShaanXi Provincial Key Lab of Speech and Image Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi\'an 710129, China. tyang@nwpu.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Tao
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: School of Telecommunications Engineering, Xidian University, Xi\'an 710126, China. jinglixd@mail.xidian.edu.cn.
authors.forename: Jing
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA. yu@eecis.udel.edu.
authors.forename: Jingyi
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.affiliation: ShaanXi Provincial Key Lab of Speech and Image Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi\'an 710129, China. ynzhangnwpu@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Yanning
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer and Information Science, University of Delaware, Newark, DE 19716, USA. 18392649664@163.com.
authors.forename: Wenguang
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Ma
authors.affiliation: ShaanXi Provincial Key Lab of Speech and Image Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi\'an 710129, China. tongxiaominnwpu@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Xiaomin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Tong
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science, University College London, London, WC1E 6BT, UK. r.yu@cs.ucl.ac.uk.
authors.forename: Rui
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.affiliation: ShaanXi Provincial Key Lab of Speech and Image Information Processing, School of Computer Science, Northwestern Polytechnical University, Xi\'an 710129, China. ranlingyannwpu@gmail.com.
authors.forename: Lingyan
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Ran
keywords: all-in-focus synthetic aperture imaging; camera array; multiple-layer visibility propagation; occluded object imaging