How Depth Estimation in Light Fields Can Benefit from Angular Super-Resolution?

With the development of consumer light field cameras, the light field imaging has become an extensively used method for capturing the 3D appearance of a scene. The depth estimation often require a dense sampled light field in the angular domain. However, there is an inherent trade-off between the angular and spatial resolution of the light field. Recently, some studies for novel view synthesis or angular super-resolution from a sparse set of have been introduced. Rather than the conventional approaches that optimize the depth maps, these approaches focus on maximizing the quality of synthetic views. In this paper, we investigate how the depth estimation can benefit from these angular super-resolution methods. Specifically, we compare the qualities of the estimated depth using the original sparse sampled light fields and the reconstructed dense sampled light fields. Experiment results evaluate the enhanced depth maps using different view synthesis approaches.