  Depth estimation is a fundamental problem for light field photography
applications. Numerous methods have been proposed in recent years, which either
focus on crafting cost terms for more robust matching, or on analyzing the
geometry of scene structures embedded in the epipolar-plane images. Significant
improvements have been made in terms of overall depth estimation error;
however, current state-of-the-art methods still show limitations in handling
intricate occluding structures and complex scenes with multiple occlusions. To
address these challenging issues, we propose a very effective depth estimation
framework which focuses on regularizing the initial label confidence map and
edge strength weights. Specifically, we first detect partially occluded
boundary regions (POBR) via superpixel based regularization. Series of
shrinkage/reinforcement operations are then applied on the label confidence map
and edge strength weights over the POBR. We show that after weight
manipulations, even a low-complexity weighted least squares model can produce
much better depth estimation than state-of-the-art methods in terms of average
disparity error rate, occlusion boundary precision-recall rate, and the
preservation of intricate visual features.
