Scalable light field compression scheme using sparse reconstruction and restoration

This paper describes a light field scalable compression scheme based on the sparsity of the angular Fourier transform of the light field. A subset of sub-aperture images (or views) is compressed using HEVC as a base layer and transmitted to the decoder. An entire light field is reconstructed from this view subset using a method exploiting the sparsity of the light field in the continuous Fourier domain. The reconstructed light field is enhanced using a patch-based restoration method. Then, restored samples are used to predict original ones, in a SHVC-based SNR-scalable scheme. Experiments with different datasets show a significant bit rate reduction of up to 24% in favor of the proposed compression method compared with a direct encoding of all the views with HEVC. The impact of the compression on the quality of the all-in-focus images is also analyzed showing the advantage of the proposed scheme.