Depth-guided view synthesis for light field reconstruction from a single image

Abstract

Light field imaging has recently become a promising technology for 3D rendering and displaying. However, capturing real-world light field images still faces many challenges in both the quantity and quality. In this paper, we develop a learning based technique to reconstruct light field from a single 2D RGB image. It includes three steps: unsupervised monocular depth estimation, view synthesis and depth-guided view inpainting. We first propose a novel monocular depth estimation network to predict disparity maps of each sub-aperture views from the central view of light field. Then we synthesize the initial sub-aperture views by using the warping scheme. Considering that occlusion makes synthesis ambiguous for pixels invisible in the central view, we present a simple but effective fully convolutional network (FCN) for view inpainting. Note that the proposed network architecture is a general framework for light field reconstruction, which can be extended to take a sparse set of views as input without changing any structure or parameters of the network. Comparison experiments demonstrate that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art light field reconstruction methods with single-view input, and achieves comparable results with the multi-input methods.