  Multiview images have flexible field of view (FoV) but inflexible depth of
field (DoF). To overcome the limitation of multiview images on visual tasks, in
this paper, we present varifocal multiview (VFMV) images with flexible DoF.
VFMV images are captured by focusing a scene on distinct depths by varying
focal planes, and each view only focused on one single plane.Therefore, VFMV
images contain more information in focal dimension than multiview images, and
can provide a rich representation for 3D scene by considering both FoV and DoF.
The characteristics of VFMV images are useful for visual tasks to achieve high
quality scene representation. Two experiments are conducted to validate the
advantages of VFMV images in 4D light field feature detection and 3D
reconstruction. Experiment results show that VFMV images can detect more light
field features and achieve higher reconstruction quality due to informative
focus cues. This work demonstrates that VFMV images have definite advantages
over multiview images in visual tasks.
