Camera array calibration for light field acquisition

Light field cameras are becoming popular in computer vision and graphics, with many research and commercial applications already having been proposed. Various types of cameras have been developed with the camera array being one of the ways of acquiring a 4D light field image using multiple cameras. Camera calibration is essential, since each application requires the correct projection and ray geometry of the light field. The calibrated parameters are used in the light field image rectified from the images captured by multiple cameras. Various camera calibration approaches have been proposed for a single camera, multiple cameras, and a moving camera. However, although these approaches can be applied to calibrating camera arrays, they are not effective in terms of accuracy and computational cost. Moreover, less attention has been paid to camera calibration of a light field camera. In this paper, we propose a calibration method for a camera array and a rectification method for generating a light field image from the captured images. We propose a two-step algorithm consisting of closed form initialization and nonlinear refinement, which extends Zhang’s well-known method to the camera array. More importantly, we introduce a rigid camera constraint whereby the array of cameras is rigidly aligned in the camera array and utilize this constraint in our calibration. Using this constraint, we obtained much faster and more accurate calibration results in the experiments.