Towards A Generic Compression Solution For Densely And Sparsely Sampled Light Field Data

Light field (LF) acquisition technologies capture the spatial and angular information present in scenes. The angular information paves the way for various post-processing applications such as scene reconstruction, refocusing, and synthetic aperture. The light field is usually captured by a single plenoptic camera or by multiple traditional cameras. The former captures a dense LF, while the latter captures a sparse LF. This paper presents a generic compression scheme that efficiently compresses both densely and sparsely sampled LFs. A plenoptic image is converted into sub-aperture images, and each sub-aperture image is interpreted as a frame of a multiview sequence. In comparison, each view of the multi-camera system is treated as a frame of a multi-view sequence. The multi-view extension of high efficiency video coding (MV-HEVC) is used to encode the pseudo multi-view sequence. This paper proposes an adaptive prediction and rate allocation scheme that efficiently compresses LF data irrespective of the acquisition technology used.