Light field all-in-focus image fusion based on wavelet domain sharpness evaluation

Traditional all-in-focus image fusion based on the multi-focus images which are captured by multiple-exposure of the camera. Light field camera has the ability of calculating the refocused images at any depth after a single exposure, which makes it more advantageous in all-in-focus image calculation. A light field all-in-focus image fusion method based on wavelet transform is proposed in this paper. Compared with the spatial image fusion method, the proposed method can effectively avoid the block artifacts and obtain a fused image with high quality. First, the refocused images used for the all-in-focus image calculation can be computed through shearing and projecting the 4D light field captured by the microlens-based light field camera. Then, the wavelet transform are applied to the refocused images and the high-frequency and low-frequency sub-images are extracted respectively. Finally, the balanced Laplace operator and pixel visibility function are proposed to evaluate the sharpness of the sub-image and to get a high-quality fusion image.Compared to the traditional region based sharpness evaluation function, the proposed method has a better performance. The experiment results prove the correctness and validity of the proposed method. The raw images captured by Lytro light field camera are used to calculate the all-in-focus image. Compared with the traditional image fusion methods, the visual effect is better and the quantitative indices are also improved with the proposed method.