Structure-from-motion in micro-image domain for uncalibrated plenoptic 2.0 cameras

We introduce a structure-from-motion method specifically designed to process the raw micro-images captured by plenoptic 2.0 cameras. Unlike traditional monocular cameras, plenoptic cameras incorporate a micro-lens array between the sensor and the main lens, capturing depth information at the expense of a more complex set of parameters to evaluate. Instead of simply integrating their projection model into the classical structure-from-motion pipeline, our contribution identifies the pinhole cameras-driven constraints and takes advantage of the inherent disparity information present in plenoptic cameras. This facilitates a robust initialization of the reconstruction. Our method shortcuts two of the limitations of the classical structure-from-motion: the ambiguity found in scenes captured with low angular disparity and the scale ambiguity. It enables the reconstruction of scenes captured by multiple uncalibrated plenoptic cameras, without using any calibration pattern or subaperture view extraction step. Our method undergoes experimental validation on both natural and synthetic datasets, showing a 10% error accuracy for relative pose estimation, which is comparable to calibration-pattern based methods. The results are robust to coarse initialization. Contrary to classical structure-from-motion, it is able to reconstruct scenes with parallel facing cameras. It also shows greater accuracy than reconstruction methods based on pinhole camera conversion.