Learned Focused Plenoptic Image Compression With Local-Global Correlation Learning

The dense light field sampling of focused plenoptic images (FPIs) yields substantial amounts of redundant data, necessitating efficient compression in practical applications. However, the presence of discontinuous structures and long-distance properties in FPIs poses a challenge. In this paper, we propose a novel end-to-end approach for learned focused plenoptic image compression (LFPIC). Specifically, we introduce a local-global correlation learning strategy to build the nonlinear transforms. This strategy can effectively handle the discontinuous structures and leverage long-distance correlations in FPI for high compression efficiency. Additionally, we propose a spatial-wise context model tailored for LFPIC to help emphasize the most related symbols during coding and further enhance the rate-distortion performance. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of our proposed method, achieving a 22.16% BD-rate reduction (measured in PSNR) on the public dataset compared to the recent state-of-the-art LFPIC method. This improvement holds significant promise for benefiting the applications of focused plenoptic cameras.