1,463 research outputs found
RLFC: Random Access Light Field Compression using Key Views and Bounded Integer Encoding
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.Comment: Accepted for publication at Symposium on Interactive 3D Graphics and
Games (I3D '19
Light Field Denoising via Anisotropic Parallax Analysis in a CNN Framework
Light field (LF) cameras provide perspective information of scenes by taking
directional measurements of the focusing light rays. The raw outputs are
usually dark with additive camera noise, which impedes subsequent processing
and applications. We propose a novel LF denoising framework based on
anisotropic parallax analysis (APA). Two convolutional neural networks are
jointly designed for the task: first, the structural parallax synthesis network
predicts the parallax details for the entire LF based on a set of anisotropic
parallax features. These novel features can efficiently capture the high
frequency perspective components of a LF from noisy observations. Second, the
view-dependent detail compensation network restores non-Lambertian variation to
each LF view by involving view-specific spatial energies. Extensive experiments
show that the proposed APA LF denoiser provides a much better denoising
performance than state-of-the-art methods in terms of visual quality and in
preservation of parallax details
Dense light field coding: a survey
Light Field (LF) imaging is a promising solution for providing more immersive and closer to reality multimedia experiences to end-users with unprecedented creative freedom and flexibility for applications in different areas, such as virtual and augmented reality. Due to the recent technological advances in optics, sensor manufacturing and available transmission bandwidth, as well as the investment of many tech giants in this area, it is expected that soon many LF transmission systems will be available to both consumers and professionals. Recognizing this, novel standardization initiatives have recently emerged in both the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) and the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), triggering the discussion on the deployment of LF coding solutions to efficiently handle the massive amount of data involved in such systems.
Since then, the topic of LF content coding has become a booming research area, attracting the attention of many researchers worldwide. In this context, this paper provides a comprehensive survey of the most relevant LF coding solutions proposed in the literature, focusing on angularly dense LFs. Special attention is placed on a thorough description of the different LF coding methods and on the main concepts related to this relevant area. Moreover, comprehensive insights are presented into open research challenges and future research directions for LF coding.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio
Learning to Predict Image-based Rendering Artifacts with Respect to a Hidden Reference Image
Image metrics predict the perceived per-pixel difference between a reference
image and its degraded (e. g., re-rendered) version. In several important
applications, the reference image is not available and image metrics cannot be
applied. We devise a neural network architecture and training procedure that
allows predicting the MSE, SSIM or VGG16 image difference from the distorted
image alone while the reference is not observed. This is enabled by two
insights: The first is to inject sufficiently many un-distorted natural image
patches, which can be found in arbitrary amounts and are known to have no
perceivable difference to themselves. This avoids false positives. The second
is to balance the learning, where it is carefully made sure that all image
errors are equally likely, avoiding false negatives. Surprisingly, we observe,
that the resulting no-reference metric, subjectively, can even perform better
than the reference-based one, as it had to become robust against
mis-alignments. We evaluate the effectiveness of our approach in an image-based
rendering context, both quantitatively and qualitatively. Finally, we
demonstrate two applications which reduce light field capture time and provide
guidance for interactive depth adjustment.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figure
Steered mixture-of-experts for light field images and video : representation and coding
Research in light field (LF) processing has heavily increased over the last decade. This is largely driven by the desire to achieve the same level of immersion and navigational freedom for camera-captured scenes as it is currently available for CGI content. Standardization organizations such as MPEG and JPEG continue to follow conventional coding paradigms in which viewpoints are discretely represented on 2-D regular grids. These grids are then further decorrelated through hybrid DPCM/transform techniques. However, these 2-D regular grids are less suited for high-dimensional data, such as LFs. We propose a novel coding framework for higher-dimensional image modalities, called Steered Mixture-of-Experts (SMoE). Coherent areas in the higher-dimensional space are represented by single higher-dimensional entities, called kernels. These kernels hold spatially localized information about light rays at any angle arriving at a certain region. The global model consists thus of a set of kernels which define a continuous approximation of the underlying plenoptic function. We introduce the theory of SMoE and illustrate its application for 2-D images, 4-D LF images, and 5-D LF video. We also propose an efficient coding strategy to convert the model parameters into a bitstream. Even without provisions for high-frequency information, the proposed method performs comparable to the state of the art for low-to-mid range bitrates with respect to subjective visual quality of 4-D LF images. In case of 5-D LF video, we observe superior decorrelation and coding performance with coding gains of a factor of 4x in bitrate for the same quality. At least equally important is the fact that our method inherently has desired functionality for LF rendering which is lacking in other state-of-the-art techniques: (1) full zero-delay random access, (2) light-weight pixel-parallel view reconstruction, and (3) intrinsic view interpolation and super-resolution
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