Data-driven light field depth estimation using deep convolution neural network

Abstract

This paper presents a data-driven approach to estimate the object depths from light field data using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN). By exploring the relationship between the epipolar-plane images (EPI) and the corresponding depth map, we propose an enhanced EPI feature that encodes the depth information of each physical point in the light field and obtains the disparity map of the whole scene in a supervised manner. This work covers two major contributions, namely the extraction of the enhanced EPI features and the light field depth estimation with CNN. The proposed features augment the depth information of the corresponding points in the light field, and then our CNN architecture differentiates them into different depth layers. Forward propagation step of the CNN model allows rapid recognition of the disparity map of the test light field data. In the experiments, we apply our method on the HCI (Heidelberg Col-laboratory for Image Processing) benchmark dataset and demonstrate that it is significantly faster than the state-of-the-art light field depth estimation approaches while achieving satisfactory performance.