Light Field De-blurring for Robotics Applications

Light field cameras record light intensity and angle of light incidence. This extra data presents a bevy of new possibilities for robotics; however, the usefulness of light field cameras may be hampered by motion blur when used on moving platforms. Traditional deconvolution de-blurring methods use a single point spread function and perform poorly in the presence of parallax. We derive a 3D point spread function for linear camera motion blur and demonstrate that this can be applied to light field images from a commercial Lytro camera. An experiment testing this approach using a moving camera is described for static scenes with objects distributed throughout the focal range. On average our method gives a doubling of the Q-factor sharpness without excessive artefacts.