Depth of field extended integral imaging based on multi-depth fitting fusion

The traditional lens-based imaging display suffers from narrow depth of field (DoF), which is one of the primary drawbacks to restrict the commercial application of integral imaging (InIm). The limitation of DoF exists because locations of the reference plane and reconstructed 3D imagery are not identical. Herein, a DoF-extended method of rendering the elemental image array (EIA) based on multi-depth fitting fusion is proposed. In this method, depth stratification across the desired viewing depth range is implemented with depth maps for accurate extracting depth information and realizing high registration accuracy for image fusion, and then the multilayer parallax images (PIs) of different depth layers are obtained. Furthermore, an adaptive depth-fusion coding is proposed to establish effective iteration of depth-feature fitting for rendering the fusion EIA with the multilayer PIs, which uses the adaptive Gaussian-based weight matrix and the least squares method. As a result, the fusion EIA with multi-depth information, namely the iteratively weighted least squares solution of the EIA, is rendered to overcome the DoF limitation for InIm. The simulation and experimental presented 3D images with extended viewing depth range are demonstrated, verifying the feasibility of the proposed method.