Depth Extraction of Partially Occluded 3D Objects Using Axially Distributed Stereo Image Sensing

There are several methods to record three dimensional (3D) information of objects such as lens array based integral imaging, synthetic aperture integral imaging (SAII), computer synthesized integral imaging (CSII), axially distributed image sensing (ADS), and axially distributed stereo image sensing (ADSS). ADSS method is capable of recording partially occluded 3D objects and reconstructing high-resolution slice plane images. In this paper, we present a computational method for depth extraction of partially occluded 3D objects using ADSS. In the proposed method, the high resolution elemental stereo image pairs are recorded by simply moving the stereo camera along the optical axis and the recorded elemental image pairs are used to reconstruct 3D slice images using the computational reconstruction algorithm. To extract depth information of partially occluded 3D object, we utilize the edge enhancement and simple block matching algorithm between two reconstructed slice image pair. To demonstrate the proposed method, we carry out the preliminary experiments and the results are presented.