Light Field (LF) imaging is a promising solution for providing more immersive and closer to reality multimedia experiences to end-users with unprecedented creative freedom and flexibility for applications in different areas, such as virtual and augmented reality. Due to the recent technological advances in optics, sensor manufacturing and available transmission bandwidth, as well as the investment of many tech giants in this area, it is expected that soon many LF transmission systems will be available to both consumers and professionals. Recognizing this, novel standardization initiatives have recently emerged in both the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) and the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), triggering the discussion on the deployment of LF coding solutions to efficiently handle the massive amount of data involved in such systems. Since then, the topic of LF content coding has become a booming research area, attracting the attention of many researchers worldwide. In this context, this paper provides a comprehensive survey of the most relevant LF coding solutions proposed in the literature, focusing on angularly dense LFs. Special attention is placed on a thorough description of the different LF coding methods and on the main concepts related to this relevant area. Moreover, comprehensive insights are presented into open research challenges and future research directions for LF coding.

This paper proposes an efficient light field image coding (LFC) solution based on High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). The proposed light field codec makes use of the self-similarity (SS) compensated prediction concept to efficiently explore the inherent correlation of this type of content. To further improve the coding performance, a bi-predicted SS estimation and SS compensation is proposed, where the candidate predictor can be also devised as a linear combination of two blocks within the same search window. In addition, an improved vector prediction scheme is also used to take advantage of the particular characteristics of the SS prediction vectors. Experimental results show that the proposed LFC scheme is able to outperform the benchmark solutions with significant gains.

Systemic disorders affecting an individual can cause gait impairments. Successful acquisition and evaluation of features representing such impairments make it possible to estimate the severity of those disorders, which is important information for monitoring patients’ health evolution. However, current state-of-the-art systems perform the acquisition and evaluation of these features in specially equipped laboratories, typically limiting the periodicity of evaluations. With the objective of making health monitoring easier and more accessible, this paper presents a system that performs automatic detection and classification of gait impairments, based on the acquisition and evaluation of biomechanical gait features using a single 2D video camera. The system relies on two different types of features to perform classification: (i) feet-related features, such as step length, step length symmetry, fraction of foot flat during stance phase, normalized step count, speed; and (ii) body-related features, such as the amount of movement while walking, center of gravity shifts and torso orientation. The proposed system uses a support vector machine to decide whether the observed gait is normal or if it belongs to one of three different impaired gait groups. Results show that the proposed system outperforms existing markerless 2D video-based systems, with a classification accuracy of 98.8%.

We demonstrated a 3D holoscopic video system for 3DTV application. We showed that using a field lens and a square aperture significantly reduces the vignetting problem associated with a relay system and achieves over 95 percent fill factor. The main problem for such a relay system is the nonlinear distortion during the 3D image capturing, which can seriously affect the reconstruction process for a 3D display. The nonlinear distortion mainly includes lens radial distortion (intrinsic) and microlens array perspective distortion (extrinsic). This is the task of future work. Our results also show that the SS coding approach performs better than the standard HEVC scheme. Furthermore, we show that search and retrieval performance relies on the depth map's quality and that the multimodal fusion boosts the retrieval performance.

Light field imaging is a promising new technology that allows the user not only to change the focus and perspective after taking a picture, as well as to generate 3D content, among other applications. However, light field images are characterized by large amounts of data and there is a lack of coding tools to efficiently encode this type of content. Therefore, this paper proposes the addition of two new prediction tools to the HEVC framework, to improve its coding efficiency. The first tool is based on the local linear embedding-based prediction and the second one is based on the self-similarity compensated prediction. Experimental results show improvements over JPEG and HEVC in terms of average bitrate savings of 71.44% and 31.87%, and average PSNR gains of 4.73dB and 0.89dB, respectively.