Learning based Deep Disentangling Light Field Reconstruction and Disparity Estimation Application

Light field cameras have a wide range of uses due to their ability to simultaneously record light intensity and direction. The angular resolution of light fields is important for downstream tasks such as depth estimation, yet is often difficult to improve due to hardware limitations. Conventional methods tend to perform poorly against the challenge of large disparity in sparse light fields, while general CNNs have difficulty extracting spatial and angular features coupled together in 4D light fields. The light field disentangling mechanism transforms the 4D light field into 2D image format, which is more favorable for CNN for feature extraction. In this paper, we propose a Deep Disentangling Mechanism, which inherits the principle of the light field disentangling mechanism and further develops the design of the feature extractor and adds advanced network structure. We design a light-field reconstruction network (i.e., DDASR) on the basis of the Deep Disentangling Mechanism, and achieve SOTA performance in the experiments. In addition, we design a Block Traversal Angular Super-Resolution Strategy for the practical application of depth estimation enhancement where the input views is often higher than 2x2 in the experiments resulting in a high memory usage, which can reduce the memory usage while having a better reconstruction performance.