An Adaptive Two-Layer Light Field Compression Scheme Using GNN-Based Reconstruction

As a new form of volumetric media, Light Field (LF) can provide users with a true six degrees of freedom immersive experience because LF captures the scene with photo-realism, including aperture-limited changes in viewpoint. But uncompressed LF data is too large for network transmission, which is the reason why LF compression has become an important research topic. One of the more recent approaches for LF compression is to reduce the angular resolution of the input LF during compression and to use LF reconstruction to recover the discarded viewpoints during decompression. Following this approach, we propose a new LF reconstruction algorithm based on Graph Neural Networks; we show that it can achieve higher compression and better quality compared to existing reconstruction methods, although suffering from the same problem as those methods—the inability to deal effectively with high-frequency image components. To solve this problem, we propose an adaptive two-layer compression architecture that separates high-frequency and low-frequency components and compresses each with a different strategy so that the performance can become robust and controllable. Experiments with multiple datasets¹ show that our proposed scheme is capable of providing a decompression quality of above 40 dB, and can significantly improve compression efficiency compared with similar LF reconstruction schemes.