U2-LFOR: A Two-Stage U2 Network for Light-Field Occlusion Removal

Light-field (LF) imaging transforms occlusion removal by using multiview data to reconstruct hidden regions, overcoming the limitations of single-view methods. However, this advanced capability often comes at the cost of increased computational complexity. To overcome this, we propose the U2-LFOR network, an end-to-end neural network designed to remove occlusions in LF images without compromising performance, addressing the inherent complexity of LF imaging while ensuring practical applicability. The architecture employs Residual Atrous Spatial Pyramid Pooling (ResASPP) at the feature extractor to expand the receptive field, capture localized multiscale features, and enable deep feature learning with efficient aggregation. A two-stage U2-Net structure enhances hierarchical feature learning while maintaining a compact design, ensuring accurate context recovery. A dedicated refinement module, using two cascaded residual blocks (ResBlock), restores fine details to the occluded regions. Experimental results demonstrate its competitive performance, achieving an average Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio (PSNR) of 29.27 dB and Structural Similarity Index Measure (SSIM) of 0.875, which are two widely used metrics for evaluating reconstruction fidelity and perceptual quality, on both synthetic and real-world LF datasets, confirming its effectiveness in accurate occlusion removal.