5D Light Field Synthesis from a Monocular Video
This addresses the challenge for users needing affordable light field video capture, though it is incremental as it builds on existing deep learning and light field synthesis techniques.
The authors tackled the problem of synthesizing 5D light field videos from monocular videos, as commercial light field cameras are limited or expensive, and achieved results that outperform previous frame-by-frame methods quantitatively and qualitatively.
Commercially available light field cameras have difficulty in capturing 5D (4D + time) light field videos. They can only capture still light filed images or are excessively expensive for normal users to capture the light field video. To tackle this problem, we propose a deep learning-based method for synthesizing a light field video from a monocular video. We propose a new synthetic light field video dataset that renders photorealistic scenes using UnrealCV rendering engine because no light field dataset is available. The proposed deep learning framework synthesizes the light field video with a full set (9$\times$9) of sub-aperture images from a normal monocular video. The proposed network consists of three sub-networks, namely, feature extraction, 5D light field video synthesis, and temporal consistency refinement. Experimental results show that our model can successfully synthesize the light field video for synthetic and actual scenes and outperforms the previous frame-by-frame methods quantitatively and qualitatively. The synthesized light field can be used for conventional light field applications, namely, depth estimation, viewpoint change, and refocusing.