A study on 5-D light field compression using multi-focus images

We propose a novel method of 5-D dynamic light field compression using multi-focus images. A light field enables us to observe its scene from various viewpoints. However, it generally consists of 4-D enormous data, that are not suitable for storing or transmitting without effective compression. 4-D light fields are very redundant because they essentially include just 3-D scene information. Actually, a method of reconstructing a light field directly from 3-D information composed of multi-focus images without any scene estimation is successfully derived, though robust 3-D scene estimation such as depth recovery from light fields is not so easy. Previously, based on the method, we proposed novel light field compression via multi-focus images as effective representation of 3-D scenes. In this paper, we extend this method to compression of 5D light fields composed of multi-view videos including the time domain. It achieves significant improvement in compression efficiency by utilizing multiple redundancy of 5D light fields. We show experimental results using synthetic videos. Quality of reconstructed light fields is evaluated by PSNR and SSIM for analyzing characteristics of its performance. They reveal that our method is much superior to light field compression using HEVC at practical lower bit-rates.