A learning-based view extrapolation method for axial super-resolution
This work addresses the need for high refocusing precision in light field applications like microscopy, offering an incremental improvement over existing methods.
The paper tackles the problem of improving axial super-resolution in light field imaging by proposing a learning-based view extrapolation method that enhances refocusing precision without requiring accurate depth estimation. Experimental results demonstrate the method's effectiveness across both synthetic and real light fields, including those with small and large baselines.
Axial light field resolution refers to the ability to distinguish features at different depths by refocusing. The axial refocusing precision corresponds to the minimum distance in the axial direction between two distinguishable refocusing planes. High refocusing precision can be essential for some light field applications like microscopy. In this paper, we propose a learning-based method to extrapolate novel views from axial volumes of sheared epipolar plane images (EPIs). As extended numerical aperture (NA) in classical imaging, the extrapolated light field gives re-focused images with a shallower depth of field (DOF), leading to more accurate refocusing results. Most importantly, the proposed approach does not need accurate depth estimation. Experimental results with both synthetic and real light fields show that the method not only works well for light fields with small baselines as those captured by plenoptic cameras (especially for the plenoptic 1.0 cameras), but also applies to light fields with larger baselines.