Learning Three-domain Implicit Image Function for Arbitrary-scale Light Field Super-Resolution

Various deep learning-based light field image super-resolution methods have attained notable success in recent years. However, most of them focus on encoder design while neglecting the critical role of upsampling process in decoder part. Motivated by the recent progress in single image domain with implicit neural representation, we elaborately propose a spatial-angular-epipolar implicit image function (SAEIIF) in this paper, which can redefine the upsampling process to significantly improve performance and enable arbitrary-scale light field super-resolution. Specifically, it contains two complementary upsampling branches. One branch incorporates spatial implicit image function (SIIF) and angular implicit image function (AIIF) to mine intra-view information in sub-aperture images and inter-view information in macro pixels. The other branch involves epipolar implicit image function (EIIF) to leverage spatial-angular correlation in epipolar plane images. By decomposing SIIF, AIIF and EIIF into horizontal and vertical two-step upsampling to form a perfect match of upsampling scale, SAEIIF introduces a multi-stage feature interaction architecture across two branches to fully merge spatial, angular and epipolar domain information. Furthermore, we optimize feature sampling strategy based on characteristics of different 2D subspace images of 4D light field. Considering that local information within sub-aperture image and macro pixel holds substantial reference value, we propose horizontal-vertical separable local sampling for SIIF and AIIF to perform efficient local sampling. Since line structure in epipolar plane image preserves spatial-angular correlation, we also design dual-source oriented line sampling for EIIF to make exact sampling along line structure. The extensive experimental results demonstrate that our SAEIIF can be effectively integrated with most encoders and achieve outstanding performance on both fixed-scale and arbitrary-scale light field spatial super-resolution, angular super-resolution, spatial-angular joint super-resolution. Our code will be available upon acceptance.