Synthesizing Light Field Video from Monocular Video

TL;DR

This paper introduces a self-supervised learning method for reconstructing light field videos from monocular videos, overcoming hardware limitations and improving quality through novel disocclusion handling, adaptive low-rank representation, and a refinement block.

Contribution

It presents a new self-supervised framework with three key techniques for monocular LF video reconstruction, outperforming previous methods.

Findings

Superior qualitative and quantitative results compared to state-of-the-art.

Effective disocclusion inpainting using adjacent frames.

Enhanced reconstruction quality with the proposed refinement block.

Abstract

The hardware challenges associated with light-field(LF) imaging has made it difficult for consumers to access its benefits like applications in post-capture focus and aperture control. Learning-based techniques which solve the ill-posed problem of LF reconstruction from sparse (1, 2 or 4) views have significantly reduced the requirement for complex hardware. LF video reconstruction from sparse views poses a special challenge as acquiring ground-truth for training these models is hard. Hence, we propose a self-supervised learning-based algorithm for LF video reconstruction from monocular videos. We use self-supervised geometric, photometric and temporal consistency constraints inspired from a recent self-supervised technique for LF video reconstruction from stereo video. Additionally, we propose three key techniques that are relevant to our monocular video input. We propose an explicit disocclusion handling technique that encourages the network to inpaint disoccluded regions in a LF frame, using information from adjacent input temporal frames. This is crucial for a self-supervised technique as a single input frame does not contain any information about the disoccluded regions. We also propose an adaptive low-rank representation that provides a significant boost in performance by tailoring the representation to each input scene. Finally, we also propose a novel refinement block that is able to exploit the available LF image data using supervised learning to further refine the reconstruction quality. Our qualitative and quantitative analysis demonstrates the significance of each of the proposed building blocks and also the superior results compared to previous state-of-the-art monocular LF reconstruction techniques. We further validate our algorithm by reconstructing LF videos from monocular videos acquired using a commercial GoPro camera.