Structured light field 3D imaging

In this paper, we propose a method by means of light field imaging under structured illumination to deal with high dynamic range 3D imaging. Fringe patterns are projected onto a scene and modulated by the scene depth then a structured light field is detected using light field recording devices. The structured light field contains information about ray direction and phase-encoded depth via which the scene depth can be estimated from different directions. The multidirectional depth estimation can achieve high dynamic 3D imaging effectively. We analyzed and derived the phase-depth mapping in the structured light field and then proposed a flexible ray-based calibration approach to determine the independent mapping coefficients for each ray. Experimental results demonstrated the validity of the proposed method to perform high-quality 3D imaging for highly and lowly reflective surfaces. (C) 2016 Optical Society of America