Super resolution of light field images using linear subspace projection of patch-volumes

Abstract

Light field imaging has emerged as a very promising technology in the field of computational photography. Cameras are becoming commercially available for capturing real-world light fields. However, capturing high spatial resolution light fields remains technologically challenging, and the images rendered from real light fields have today a significantly lower spatial resolution compared to traditional two-dimensional (2-D) cameras. This paper describes an example-based super-resolution algorithm for light fields, which allows the increase of the spatial resolution of the different views in a consistent manner across all subaperture images of the light field. The algorithm learns linear projections between subspaces of reduced dimension in which reside patch-volumes extracted from the light field. The method is extended to cope with angular super-resolution, where 2-D patches of intermediate subaperture images are approximated from neighboring subaperture images using multivariate ridge regression. Experimental results show significant quality improvement when compared to state-of-the-art single-image super-resolution methods applied on each view separately, as well as when compared to a recent light field super-resolution techniques based on deep learning.