Super-Rays for Efficient Light-Field Processing

Light field acquisition devices allow capturing scenes with unmatched postprocessing possibilities. However, the huge amount of high-dimensional data poses challenging problems to light field processing in interactive time. In order to enable light field processing with a tractable complexity, in this paper, we address the problem of light field oversegmentation. We introduce the concept of superray, which is a grouping of rays within and across views, as a key component of a light field processing pipeline. The proposed approach is simple, fast, accurate, easily parallelisable, and does not need a dense depth estimation. We demonstrate experimentally the efficiency of the proposed approach on real and synthetic datasets, for sparsely and densely sampled light fields. As superrays capture a coarse scene geometry information, we also present how they can be used for real-time light field segmentation and correcting refocusing angular aliasing.