Cross-View Recurrence-Based Self-Supervised Super-Resolution of Light Field

Compared with external-supervised learning-based (ESLB) methods, self-supervised learning-based (SSLB) methods can overcome the domain gap problem caused by different light field (LF) acquisition conditions, which results in the performance degradation of light field super-resolution on unseen test datasets. Current SSLB methods exploit the cross-scale recurrence feature in the single view image for super-resolution, ignoring the correlation information among views. Different from previous works, we propose a cross-view recurrence-based self-supervised mapping framework to correlate complementary information among views in the down-scaled input LF. Specifically, the cross-view recurrence information consists of geometry structure features and similar structure features. The former is to provide sub-pixel information according to disparity correlations among adjacent views, and the latter is to acquire similar color and contour information among arbitrary views, which can compensate for error disparity guidance of geometry structure features in sharp variance areas. Moreover, instead of the widely used “All-to-All” strategy, we propose a “Part-to-Part” mapping strategy, which is better competent for SSLB approaches with limited training examples solely extracted from input LF. Finally, considering that self-supervised methods need to retrain from the beginning toward each test image, based on the proposed “part-to-part” strategy, an efficient end-to-end network is designed to extract these cross-view features for superior SASR performance with less training time. Experiment results demonstrate that our method outperforms other state-of-the-art ESLB methods on both large and small domain gap cases. Compared with the only SSLB method (LFZSSR), our approach achieves better performance with 524 times less training time.