A Learning Based Depth Estimation Framework for 4D Densely and Sparsely Sampled Light Fields

Abstract

This paper proposes a learning based solution to disparity (depth) estimation for either densely or sparsely sampled light fields. Disparity between stereo pairs among a sparse subset of anchor views is first estimated by a fine-tuned FlowNet 2.0 network adapted to disparity prediction task. These coarse estimates are fused by exploiting the photo-consistency warping error, and refined by a Multi-view Stereo Refinement Network (MSRNet). The propagation of disparity from anchor viewpoints towards other viewpoints is performed by an occlusion-aware soft 3D reconstruction method. The experiments show that, both for dense and sparse light fields, our algorithm outperforms significantly the state-of-the-art algorithms, especially for subpixel accuracy.