Harnessing Multi-View Perspective of Light Fields for Low-Light Imaging

Light Field (LF) offers unique advantages such as post-capture refocusing and depth estimation, but low-light conditions severely limit these capabilities. To restore low-light LFs we should harness the geometric cues present in different LF views, which is not possible using single-frame low-light enhancement techniques. We propose a deep neural network L3Fnet for Low-Light Light Field (L3F) restoration, which not only performs visual enhancement of each LF view but also preserves the epipolar geometry across views. We achieve this by adopting a two-stage architecture for L3Fnet. Stage-I looks at all the LF views to encode the LF geometry. This encoded information is then used in Stage-II to reconstruct each LF view. To facilitate learning-based techniques for low-light LF imaging, we collected a comprehensive LF dataset of various scenes. For each scene, we captured four LFs, one with near-optimal exposure and ISO settings and the others at different levels of low-light conditions varying from low to extreme low-light settings. The effectiveness of the proposed L3Fnet is supported by both visual and numerical comparisons on this dataset. To further analyze the performance of low-light restoration methods, we also propose the L3F-wild dataset that contains LF captured late at night with almost zero lux values. No ground truth is available in this dataset. To perform well on the L3F-wild dataset, any method must adapt to the light level of the captured scene. To do this we use a pre-processing block that makes L3Fnet robust to various degrees of low-light conditions. Lastly, we show that L3Fnet can also be used for low-light enhancement of single-frame images, despite it being engineered for LF data. We do so by converting the single-frame DSLR image into a form suitable to L3Fnet, which we call as pseudo-LF. Our code and dataset is available for download at https://mohitlamba94.github.io/L3Fnet/

Automated summary

The article introduces a deep neural network L3Fnet for low-light Light Field restoration, implemented through a two-stage architecture. The effectiveness of L3Fnet is supported by comparisons on LF dataset and L3F-wild dataset. Additionally, it is shown that L3Fnet can also be used for low-light enhancement of single-frame images.