An End-to-End Spatially Scalable Light Field Image Compression Method

Recently, learning-based light field (LF) image compression methods have achieved impressive progress, while end-to-end spatially scalable LF image compression (SS-LFIC) has not been explored. To tackle this problem, this paper proposes an end-to-end spatially scalable LF compression network (SSLFC-Net). In the SSLFC-Net, a spatial-angular domain-specific enhancement layer coding strategy is designed to boost the coding performance of the enhancement layers (ELs). Specifically, by referencing domain-specific features, the ELs compress spatial features by predictive coding in the spatial domain to effectively remove inter-layer spatial redundancy, and reconstruct angular features by decoder-side generative method in the angular domain to strategically avoid angular compression. Particularly, to produce accurate spatial predictions and reconstruct high-quality LF images, an inter-layer spatial prediction module and a spatial-angular context-aware reconstruction module are presented to collaboratively promote EL compression. Experiments show that the proposed SSLFC-Net effectively supports spatial scalability and achieves state-of-the-art rate-distortion performance.