Light Field Image Coding for Efficient Refocusing

In video-based light field image coding, researchers often encode a selected subset of sub-aperture images (SAIs). The subset is heuristically selected as 9x9, 11x11, or 13x13 SAIs out of full 15x15 SAIs. Previous work has focused only on the compression efficiency without light field functionality such as refocusing. This paper evaluates the impact of selecting subset of SAIs not only on the compression quality but also on the quality of refocused light field image. A subset of SAIs is proposed to achieve both comparable compression performance and good quality of the refocused images. Compared to full 15x15 SAIs, our method reduces bitrate by 18.4% in viewpoint of compression and at the same time, maintains a good quality of refocused images.