Fast Light-field Disparity Estimation with Multi-disparity-scale Cost Aggregation

Light field images contain both angular and spatial information of captured light rays. The rich information of light fields enables straightforward disparity recovery capability but demands high computational cost as well. In this paper, we design a lightweight disparity estimation model with physical-based multi-disparity-scale cost volume aggregation for fast disparity estimation. By introducing a sub-network of edge guidance, we significantly improve the recovery of geometric details near edges and improve the overall performance. We test the proposed model extensively on both synthetic and real-captured datasets, which provide both densely and sparsely sampled light fields. Finally, we significantly reduce computation cost and GPU memory consumption, while achieving comparable performance with state-of-the-art disparity estimation methods for light fields.