LapEPI-Net: A Laplacian Pyramid EPI structure for Learning-based Dense Light Field Reconstruction

TL;DR

This paper introduces LapEPI-net, a novel learning-based framework utilizing a Laplacian Pyramid EPI structure to effectively address aliasing and blurring trade-offs in dense light field reconstruction, especially for non-Lambertian scenes.

Contribution

The paper proposes a LapEPI structure and network architecture that improve aliasing and blurring handling in light field reconstruction, with a transfer-learning strategy for non-Lambertian performance.

Findings

High reconstruction quality demonstrated in experiments.

Robustness across diverse light field data.

Effective handling of aliasing and blurring trade-offs.

Abstract

For dense sampled light field (LF) reconstruction problem, existing approaches focus on a depth-free framework to achieve non-Lambertian performance. However, they trap in the trade-off "either aliasing or blurring" problem, i.e., pre-filtering the aliasing components (caused by the angular sparsity of the input LF) always leads to a blurry result. In this paper, we intend to solve this challenge by introducing an elaborately designed epipolar plane image (EPI) structure within a learning-based framework. Specifically, we start by analytically showing that decreasing the spatial scale of an EPI shows higher efficiency in addressing the aliasing problem than simply adopting pre-filtering. Accordingly, we design a Laplacian Pyramid EPI (LapEPI) structure that contains both low spatial scale EPI (for aliasing) and high-frequency residuals (for blurring) to solve the trade-off problem. We then propose a novel network architecture for the LapEPI structure, termed as LapEPI-net. To ensure the non-Lambertian performance, we adopt a transfer-learning strategy by first pre-training the network with natural images then fine-tuning it with unstructured LFs. Extensive experiments demonstrate the high performance and robustness of the proposed approach for tackling the aliasing-or-blurring problem as well as the non-Lambertian reconstruction.