An automatic calibration method is proposed for a microlens-based plenoptic camera. First, all microlens images on the white image are searched and recognized automatically based on digital morphology. Then, the center points of microlens images are rearranged according to their relative position relationships. Consequently, the microlens images are located, i.e., the plenoptic camera is calibrated without the prior knowledge of camera parameters. Furthermore, this method is appropriate for all types of microlens-based plenoptic cameras, even the multifocus plenoptic camera, the plenoptic camera with arbitrarily arranged microlenses, or the plenoptic camera with different sizes of microlenses. Finally, we verify our method by the raw data of Lytro. The experiments show that our method has higher intelligence than the methods published before. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]