Cross-MPI: Cross-scale Stereo for Image Super-Resolution using Multiplane Images
This work tackles the problem of high-fidelity super-resolution for multiscale camera systems, which is a significant challenge for computational photography practitioners, by improving performance under large resolution gaps.
This paper addresses the challenge of reference-based super-resolution (RefSR) with large resolution gaps (e.g., 8x upscaling) by introducing Cross-MPI, an end-to-end network inspired by multiplane image (MPI) representation. Cross-MPI achieves superior performance against existing RefSR methods on both digitally synthesized and optical zoom cross-scale data, demonstrating its suitability for actual multiscale camera systems.
Various combinations of cameras enrich computational photography, among which reference-based superresolution (RefSR) plays a critical role in multiscale imaging systems. However, existing RefSR approaches fail to accomplish high-fidelity super-resolution under a large resolution gap, e.g., 8x upscaling, due to the lower consideration of the underlying scene structure. In this paper, we aim to solve the RefSR problem in actual multiscale camera systems inspired by multiplane image (MPI) representation. Specifically, we propose Cross-MPI, an end-to-end RefSR network composed of a novel plane-aware attention-based MPI mechanism, a multiscale guided upsampling module as well as a super-resolution (SR) synthesis and fusion module. Instead of using a direct and exhaustive matching between the cross-scale stereo, the proposed plane-aware attention mechanism fully utilizes the concealed scene structure for efficient attention-based correspondence searching. Further combined with a gentle coarse-to-fine guided upsampling strategy, the proposed Cross-MPI can achieve a robust and accurate detail transmission. Experimental results on both digitally synthesized and optical zoom cross-scale data show that the Cross-MPI framework can achieve superior performance against the existing RefSR methods and is a real fit for actual multiscale camera systems even with large-scale differences.