A Dataset and Evaluation Methodology for Depth Estimation on 4D Light Fields

In computer vision communities such as stereo, optical flow, or visual tracking, commonly accepted and widely used benchmarks have enabled objective comparison and boosted scientific progress. In the emergent light field community, a comparable benchmark and evaluation methodology is still missing. The performance of newly proposed methods is often demonstrated qualitatively on a handful of images, making quantitative comparison and targeted progress very difficult. To overcome these difficulties, we propose a novel light field benchmark. We provide 24 carefully designed synthetic, densely sampled 4D light fields with highly accurate disparity ground truth. We thoroughly evaluate four state-of-the-art light field algorithms and one multi-view stereo algorithm using existing and novel error measures. This consolidated state-of-the art may serve as a baseline to stimulate and guide further scientific progress. We publish the benchmark website http://www.lightfield-analysis.net , an evaluation toolkit, and our rendering setup to encourage submissions of both algorithms and further datasets.