Dense Light Field Coding: A Survey

Paulo Nunes,Luis Ducla Soares,Caroline Conti

doi:10.1109/access.2020.2977767

Paulo Nunes, Luis Ducla Soares + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1109/access.2020.2977767

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Abstract

Light Field (LF) imaging is a promising solution for providing more immersive and closer to reality multimedia experiences to end-users with unprecedented creative freedom and flexibility for applications in different areas, such as virtual and augmented reality. Due to the recent technological advances in optics, sensor manufacturing and available transmission bandwidth, as well as the investment of many tech giants in this area, it is expected that soon many LF transmission systems will be available to both consumers and professionals. Recognizing this, novel standardization initiatives have recently emerged in both the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) and the Moving Picture Experts Group (MPEG), triggering the discussion on the deployment of LF coding solutions to efficiently handle the massive amount of data involved in such systems. Since then, the topic of LF content coding has become a booming research area, attracting the attention of many researchers worldwide. In this context, this paper provides a comprehensive survey of the most relevant LF coding solutions proposed in the literature, focusing on angularly dense LFs. Special attention is placed on a thorough description of the different LF coding methods and on the main concepts related to this relevant area. Moreover, comprehensive insights are presented into open research challenges and future research directions for LF coding.

Highlights

Light Field (LF) imaging is a promising solution for providing more immersive and closer to reality multimedia experiences to end-users with unprecedented creative freedom and flexibility for applications in different areas, such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) [1], cinematography [2], three dimensional (3D) television [3], [4], biometric recognition [5], and medical imaging [6]
The coding performance of this representation is highly dependent on the selection of the key views and the accuracy of the geometry information estimated from the acquired LF data
This study focuses on comparing the performance, in terms of objective quality of rendered views, of the different transform coding solutions used in each standard, namely: the Joint Photographic Experts Group (JPEG) 2000 Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and the block-based Discrete Cosine Transform (DCT) transform used in JPEG XR [142]

Summary

INTRODUCTION

Light Field (LF) imaging is a promising solution for providing more immersive and closer to reality multimedia experiences to end-users with unprecedented creative freedom and flexibility for applications in different areas, such as Virtual Reality (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR) [1], cinematography [2], three dimensional (3D) television [3], [4], biometric recognition [5], and medical imaging [6]. Due to the recent technological advances in optics, sensor manufacturing and available transmission bandwidth, the research in richer imaging technologies has accelerated and practical designs of novel LF acquisition [2], [7] and LF display [3], [4], [8] systems have been rapidly maturing These devices allow sampling the light rays from every direction through every point in a volume of space and allow using this information to recreate the correct perspective of the scene from any viewpoint position inside this volume. The main contributions of this survey paper are: 1) To better assist new researchers in this area, a brief overview of the principles of LF imaging technology and of LF processing is presented This overview covers the main stages that are essential for delivering LF content to end-users, including the recent developments related to LF acquisition, representation, rendering, display, and visual quality evaluation.

LIGHT FIELD IMAGING AND PROCESSING

Findings

FINAL REMARKS