Face Detection by the use of a Plenoptic Camera

Abstract

Light field imaging has emerged as a technology allowing to capture richer visual information from our world. Unlike conventional cameras, which record the 2D projection of the light rays by angularly integrating the rays at each pixel, a light field cameras capture not only the light intensity in the image plane but also the information about the direction of light rays. Although face detection is a widely accepted form of biometrics due to its ease of capture, it still suffers from out-of-focus imaging due to the limited depth-of-field found in conventional 2D imaging systems. In this work, and in order to overcome such a challenge, we use the light field to obtain a number of depth images. Then, a fusion technique is used to fuse the best focus images. The resulted image contains all faces from different focuses presented in the same image, which solves the problem of face detection from out-of-focus imaging.