Spatial and Angular Variational Super-Resolution of 4D Light Fields

We present a variational framework to generate super-resolved novel views from 4D light field data sampled at low resolution, for example by a plenoptic camera. In contrast to previous work, we formulate the problem of view synthesis as a continuous inverse problem, which allows us to correctly take into account foreshortening effects caused by scene geometry transformations. High-accuracy depthmaps for the input views are locally estimated using epipolar plane image analysis, which yields floating point depth precision without the need for expensive matching cost minimization. The disparity maps are further improved by increasing angular resolution with synthesized intermediate views. Minimization of the super-resolution model energy is performed with state of the art convex optimization algorithms within seconds.