Stereoscopic image generation from light field with disparity scaling and super-resolution

In this paper, we propose a novel method to generate stereoscopic images from light-field images with the intended depth range and simultaneously perform image super-resolution. Subject to the small baseline of neighboring subaperture views and low spatial resolution of light-field images captured using compact commercial light-field cameras, the disparity range of any two subaperture views is usually very small. We propose a method to control the disparity range of the target stereoscopic images with linear or nonlinear disparity scaling and properly resolve the disocclusion problem with the aid of a smooth energy term previously used for texture synthesis. The left and right views of the target stereoscopic image are simultaneously generated by a unified optimization framework, which preserves content coherence between the left and right views by a coherence energy term. The disparity range of the target stereoscopic image can be larger than that of the input light field image. This benefits many light field image-based applications, e.g., displaying light field images on various stereo display devices and generating stereoscopic panoramic images from a light field image montage. An extensive experimental evaluation demonstrates the effectiveness of our method.