Light field all-in-focus image fusion based on spatially-guided angular information

Compared to traditional 2D images, light field images record both spatial and angular information of the scene, which can provide more data for image fusion. In this paper, a light field all-in-focus image fusion algorithm based on spatially-guided angular information is proposed. In the proposed method, the initial weight maps carrying the angular information are calculated by comparing the block variance of the 4D light field data. The initial weight maps are then guided by digital refocused images carrying the spatial information to obtain the refined weight maps. In the refocused image multi-scale decomposition, the micro-lens calibration error is considered and the additional edge layers are extracted to suppress the edge artifacts. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. Quantitative evaluation results show that the proposed algorithm performs the best in the feature-based index and structural similarity-based index without sacrificing the information and perceptual sharpness of the fused image.