3D-scene acquisition and representation is important in many areas ranging from medical imaging to visual entertainment application. In this regard, optical imaging acquisition combined with post-capture processing algorithms enable the synthesis of images with novel viewpoints of a scene. This work presents a new method to reconstruct a pair of stereoscopic images of a 3D-scene from a multi-focus image stack. A conventional monocular camera combined with an electrically tunable lens (ETL) is used for image acquisition. The captured visual information is reorganized considering a piecewise-planar image formation model with a depth-variant point spread function (PSF) along with the known focusing distances at which the images of the stack were acquired. The consideration of a depth-variant PSF allows the application of the method to strongly defocused multi-focus image stacks. Finally, post-capture perspective shifts, presenting each eye the corresponding viewpoint according to the disparity, are generated by simulating the displacement of a synthetic pinhole camera. The procedure is performed without estimation of the depth-map or segmentation of the in-focus regions. Experimental results for both real and synthetic data images are provided and presented as anaglyphs, but it could easily be implemented in 3D displays based in parallax barrier or polarized light.

Date Published: 14 September 2016
PDF: 9 pages
Proc. SPIE 9970, Optics and Photonics for Information Processing X, 99700J (14 September 2016); doi: 10.1117/12.2237086

Published in SPIE Proceedings Vol. 9970:
Optics and Photonics for Information Processing X
Khan M. Iftekharuddin; Abdul A. S. Awwal; Mireya García Vázquez; Andrés Márquez; Mohammad A. Matin, Editor(s)