Ray-Space Projection Model for Light Field Camera

Light field essentially represents the collection of rays in space. The rays captured by multiple light field cameras form subsets of full rays in 3D space and can be transformed to each other. However, most previous approaches model the projection from an arbitrary point in 3D space to corresponding pixel on the sensor. There are few models on describing the ray sampling and transformation among multiple light field cameras. In the paper, we propose a novel ray-space projection model to transform sets of rays captured by multiple light field cameras in term of the Plucker coordinates. We first derive a 6x6 ray-space intrinsic matrix based on multi-projection-center (MPC) model. A homogeneous ray-space projection matrix and a fundamental matrix are then proposed to establish ray-ray correspondences among multiple light fields. Finally, based on the ray-space projection matrix, a novel camera calibration method is proposed to verify the proposed model. A linear constraint and a ray-ray cost function are established for linear initial solution and non-linear optimization respectively. Experimental results on both synthetic and real light field data have verified the effectiveness and robustness of the proposed model.