Light field super-resolution using complementary-view feature attention

Light field (LF) cameras record multiple perspectives by a sparse sampling of real scenes, and these perspectives provide complementary information. This information is beneficial to LF super-resolution (LFSR). Compared with traditional single-image super-resolution, LF can exploit parallax structure and perspective correlation among different LF views. Furthermore, the performance of existing methods are limited as they fail to deeply explore the complementary information across LF views. In this paper, we propose a novel network, called the light field complementary-view feature attention network (LF-CFANet), to improve LFSR by dynamically learning the complementary information in LF views. Specifically, we design a residual complementary-view spatial and channel attention module (RCSCAM) to effectively interact with complementary information between complementary views. Moreover, RCSCAM captures the relationships between different channels, and it is able to generate informative features for reconstructing LF images while ignoring redundant information. Then, a maximum-difference information supplementary branch (MDISB) is used to supplement information from the maximum-difference angular positions based on the geometric structure of LF images. This branch also can guide the process of reconstruction. Experimental results on both synthetic and real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our method. The proposed LF-CFANet has a more advanced reconstruction performance that displays faithful details with higher SR accuracy than state-of-the-art methods.[Figure not available: see fulltext.]