Light Field Reconstruction Using Multi-orientation Epipolar Plane Images

Light field reconstruction is one of the most important techniques for future glass-free 3D media production. However, current techniques suffer from low view-consistency and fixed patterns of view-trajectory. This article presents the 3D Multi-orientation Epipolar Plane Image (MOEPI) representation for high-quality light field reconstruction with both the inter-view and extra-view settings. Each layer in MOEPI is composed of EPI lines with a fixed orientation. To infer the MOEPI, a new Multi-reference Focal Stack (MRFS) intermediate representation is proposed. The optimization of MOEPI could be regarded as the problem of the most-focused content extraction from the MRFS. This optimization is implemented with a 3D U-shaped network. We also propose the LPIPS-EPI metric for evaluating the view-consistency. Experiments on light fields with both high and low signal-to-noise ratios demonstrate that the proposed MOEPI representation could synthesize high-quality light fields especially in occlusion or un-captured areas.