Progressive spatial-angular feature enhancement network for light field image super-resolution

The intensity and direction of the light field (LF) can be recorded simultaneously by using LF cameras. However, since LF cameras sacrifice spatial resolution for higher angular resolution, the images acquired by LF cameras tend to have low spatial resolution. Therefore, LF image super-resolution (SR) has become an integral part of LF studies. Many existing LF image SR methods fail to fully utilize angular and spatial information due to only using partial sub-aperture images (SAIs). In this paper, we propose a progressive spatial-angular feature enhancement network (PSAFENet) to deal with the problem of missing information in LF image SR. Specifically, we first extract the spatial features of SAIs, the spatial and angular features contained in the macro-pixel images (MacPIs) by three different feature extraction modules. Then, these features are fed into a spatial-angular feature enhancement (SAFE) module to perform enhancement of spatial-angular information on the SAIs. To improve the reconstruction accuracy, we also use the information multi-distillation block (IMDB) to remove the redundant information before upsampling. Our network can well merge the angular and spatial information into each SAI, which facilitates the reconstruction of the LF images. Experimental results on five public datasets show that the proposed PSAFENet method outperforms existing methods in both qualitative and quantitative comparisons.