Depth range accuracy for plenoptic cameras

Plenoptic cameras capture the directional information of the light distribution from a scene. This is accomplished by positioning a microlens array between the main lens and the sensor. This configuration obtains multiple projections for a point in the object space, which allows to retrieve the point's depth on a single exposure. In recent years, several studies recover depth and shape from the lightfield data using several cues. Nonetheless, references regarding the depth capabilities of a standard plenoptic camera with different zoom and focus settings are scarce. In this work, we formalize a forward projection model and consider projection geometry cues to improve a metric reconstruction methodology for a calibrated standard plenoptic camera. The metric reconstruction methodology is used to evaluate the depth estimation accuracy under certain zoom and focus settings. The reconstruction is applied to new datasets captured for this purpose with objects placed at depths between 0.05 and 2.00 meters. The results indicate that these cameras are able to reconstruct accurately points within the depth range analyzed by appropriately choosing the zoom and focus depth settings. The zoom is a determinant factor on the reconstruction accuracy and the focus depth allows to determine the reconstruction depth range.