Consistency analysis of focal stack-based light field reconstruction

•We report a high-precision light field reconstruction technique, termed focal stack-based light field reconstruction (FS-LFR).•FS-LFR uses a single focal stack measurement on the base of the pre-calibrated metric mapping of depths between object and image spaces to reconstruct high-precision light field.•We compare and analyze the results of the reconstructed light field of the object and image space from four aspects, involving digital refocusing, viewpoint switching, angular resolution, depth range and sampling rate.•In contrast to conventional approaches without the calibration, FS-LFR has higher accuracy when satisfying the spatial consistency of the object. It verifies the necessity of object-image space consistency for high-quality FS-LFR, which can be used as a mechanism to realize and apply computational light field imaging when the recording and reconstruction lie in nonlinear mapping spaces.