Revisiting Spatio-Angular Trade-off in Light Field Cameras and Extended Applications in Super-Resolution

Light field cameras (LFCs) have received increasing attention due to their wide-spread applications. However, current LFCs suffer from the well-known spatio-angular trade-off, which is considered an inherent and fundamental limit for LFC designs. In this article, by doing a detailed optical analysis of sampling process in LFC, we show that effective resolution generally higher than number micro-lenses. This contribution makes it theoretically possible super-resolve light field. Further proves “2D predictable series” nature 4D field, provides new insights analyzing using series processing techniques. To model nature, specifically designed epipolar plane image (EPI) based CNN-LSTM network proposed spatial angular dimensions simultaneously. Rather leveraging semantic information, our focuses on extracting geometric continuity EPI domain. gives method improved generalization ability applicable wide range previously unseen scenes. Experiments both synthetic real fields demonstrate improvements over state-of-the-arts, especially large disparity areas.