RLFC: Random Access Light Field Compression using Key Views and Bounded Integer Encoding

TL;DR

The paper introduces RLFC, a hierarchical light field image compression method that enables fast, high-quality rendering with random access, suitable for interactive applications, by exploiting redundancies through a tree structure and bounded integer encoding.

Contribution

RLFC is a novel hierarchical compression scheme for light fields that combines tree-based redundancy exploitation with bounded integer encoding for efficient, fast, and random access decompression.

Findings

Achieves compression rates from 0.08 to 2.5 bpp with high visual quality.

Decompression times are 1-3 microseconds per channel on GPU.

Supports rendering at 200 fps for 512x512 views.

Abstract

We present a new hierarchical compression scheme for encoding light field images (LFI) that is suitable for interactive rendering. Our method (RLFC) exploits redundancies in the light field images by constructing a tree structure. The top level (root) of the tree captures the common high-level details across the LFI, and other levels (children) of the tree capture specific low-level details of the LFI. Our decompressing algorithm corresponds to tree traversal operations and gathers the values stored at different levels of the tree. Furthermore, we use bounded integer sequence encoding which provides random access and fast hardware decoding for compressing the blocks of children of the tree. We have evaluated our method for 4D two-plane parameterized light fields. The compression rates vary from 0.08 - 2.5 bits per pixel (bpp), resulting in compression ratios of around 200:1 to 20:1 for a PSNR quality of 40 to 50 dB. The decompression times for decoding the blocks of LFI are 1 - 3 microseconds per channel on an NVIDIA GTX-960 and we can render new views with a resolution of 512X512 at 200 fps. Our overall scheme is simple to implement and involves only bit manipulations and integer arithmetic operations.