CutMIB: Boosting Light Field Super-Resolution via Multi-View Image Blending

Data augmentation (DA) is an efficient strategy for improving the performance of deep neural networks. Recent DA strategies have demonstrated utility in single image super-resolution (SR). Little research has, however, focused on the DA strategy for light field SR, in which multi-view information utilization is required. For the first time in light field SR, we propose a potent DA strategy called CutMIB to improve the performance of existing light field SR networks while keeping their structures unchanged. Specifically, CutMIB first cuts low-resolution (LR) patches from each view at the same location. Then CutMIB blends all LR patches to generate the blended patch and finally pastes the blended patch to the corresponding regions of high-resolution light field views, and vice versa. By doing so, CutMIB enables light field SR networks to learn from implicit geometric information during the training stage. Experimental results demonstrate that CutMIB can improve the reconstruction performance and the angular consistency of existing light field SR networks. We further verify the effectiveness of CutMIB on real-world light field SR and light field denoising. The implementation code is available at https://github.com/zeyuxiao1997/CutMIB.