Guided integral filter for light field stereo matching

Different from the traditional multi-view images, the sampling in angular resolution of light field images is continuous in each direction. Therefore, an angular sampling image, comprising of matching points extracted from each view, can be constructed at different possible depth for each point. In this paper, we prove that the angular sampling image of an occluded point at the correct depth is similar to the scene around the point. On this basis, a guided integral filter acquired from the reference view is proposed to weight the matching points for consistency measure, which predicts the probabilities of occlusions. The discrete labeling problem is then solved by a filter-based algorithm to approximate the optimal solution. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art methods for light field depth estimation both in occluded and ambiguous regions, and has no requirement for angular resolution.