Performance-enhanced recognition of a far and partially occluded 3-D object by use of direct pixel-mapping in computational curving-effective integral imaging

In this paper, we propose a novel approach to enhance the recognition performance of a far and partially occluded three-dimensional (3-D) target in computational curving-effective integral imaging by using the direct pixel-mapping (DPM) method. With this scheme, the elemental image array (EIA) originally picked up from a far and partially occluded 3-D target can be converted into a new EIA just like the one virtually picked up from a target located close to the lenslet array. Due to this characteristic of DPM, resolution and quality of the reconstructed target image can be highly enhanced, which results in a significant improvement of recognition performance of a far 3-D object. In addition, the computational time required for reconstruction of a far 3-D target could be also reduced because the distance between the lenslet array and image plane is virtually shortened in the new EIA transformed by DPM. Experimental results reveal that image quality of the reconstructed target image and object recognition performance of the proposed system have been improved by 1.75 dB and 4.56% on the average in PSNR (peak-to-peak signal-to-noise ratio) and NCC (normalized correlation coefficient), respectively, compared to the conventional system.