End-to-End Light Field Spatial Super-Resolution Network Using Multiple Epipolar Geometry

Light Field (LF) cameras are considered to have many potential applications since angular and spatial information is captured simultaneously. However, the limited spatial resolution has brought lots of difficulties in developing related applications and becomes the main bottleneck of LF cameras. In this paper, an end-to-end learning-based method is proposed to simultaneously reconstruct all view images in LFs with higher spatial resolution. Based on the epipolar geometry, view images in one LF are first grouped into several image stacks and fed into different network branches to learn sub-pixel details for each view image. Since LFs have dense sampling in angular domain, sub-pixel details in multiple spatial directions are learned from corresponding angular directions in multiple branches, respectively. Then, sub-pixel details from different directions are further integrated to generate global high-frequency residual details. Combined with the spatially upsampled LF, the final LF with high spatial resolution is obtained. Experimental results on synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art methods in both visual and numerical evaluations. We also implement the proposed method on LFs with different angular resolution and experiments show that the proposed method achieves superior results than others, especially for LFs with small angular resolution. Furthermore, since the epipolar geometry is fully considered, the proposed network shows good performances in preserving the inherent epipolar property in LF images.