Remote Sensing, Vol. 12, Pages 1125: Enhanced 3D Point Cloud from a Light Field Image (Remote Sensing)

The importance of three-dimensional (3D) point cloud technologies in the field of agriculture environmental research has increased in recent years. Obtaining dense and accurate 3D reconstructions of plants and urban areas provide useful information for remote sensing. In this paper, we propose a novel strategy for the enhancement of 3D point clouds from a single 4D light field (LF) image. Using a light field camera in this way creates an easy way for obtaining 3D point clouds from one snapshot and enabling diversity in monitoring and modelling applications for remote sensing. Considering an LF image and associated depth map as an input, we first apply histogram equalization and histogram stretching to enhance the separation between depth planes. We then apply multi-modal edge detection by using feature matching and fuzzy logic from the central sub-aperture LF image and the depth map. These two steps of depth map enhancement are significant parts of our novelty for this work. After combing the two previous steps and transforming the point–plane correspondence, we can obtain the 3D point cloud. We tested our method with synthetic and real world image databases. To verify the accuracy of our method, we compared our results with two different state-of-the-art algorithms. The results showed that our method can reliably mitigate noise and had the highest level of detail compared to other existing methods.