Light Field Reconstruction Using Residual Networks on Raw Images

Although Light-Field (LF) technology attracts attention due to its large number of applications, especially with the introduction of consumer LF cameras and its frequent use, reconstructing densely sampled LF images represents a great challenge to the use and development of LF technology. Our paper proposes a learning-based method to reconstruct densely sampled LF images from a sparse set of input images. We trained our model with raw LF images rather than using multiple images of the same scene. Raw LF can represent the two-dimensional array of images captured in a single image. Therefore, it enables the network to understand and model the relationship between different images of the same scene well and thus restore more texture details and provide better quality. Using raw images has transformed the task from image reconstruction into image-to-image translation. The feature of small-baseline LF was used to define the images to be reconstructed using the nearest input view to initialize input images. Our network was trained end-to-end to minimize the sum of absolute errors between the reconstructed and ground-truth images. Experimental results on three challenging real-world datasets demonstrate the high performance of our proposed method and its outperformance over the state-of-the-art methods.