A Novel Light Field Coding Scheme Based on Deep Belief Network and Weighted Binary Images for Additive Layered Displays

Light field display caters to the viewer's immersive experience by providing binocular depth sensation and motion parallax. Glasses-free tensor light field display is becoming a prominent area of research in auto-stereoscopic display technology. Stacking light attenuating layers is one of the approaches to implement a light field display with a good depth of field, wide viewing angles and high resolution. This paper presents a compact and efficient representation of light field data based on scalable compression of the binary represented image layers suitable for additive layered display using a Deep Belief Network (DBN). The proposed scheme learns and optimizes the additive layer patterns using a convolutional neural network (CNN). Weighted binary images represent the optimized patterns, reducing the file size and introducing scalable encoding. The DBN further compresses the weighted binary patterns into a latent space representation followed by encoding the latent data using an h.254 codec. The proposed scheme is compared with benchmark codecs such as h.264 and h.265 and achieved competitive performance on light field data.