In this paper, we propose a novel filtering method based on deep attention networks for the quality enhancement of light field (LF) images captured by plenoptic cameras and compressed using the High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) standard. The proposed architecture was built using efficient complex processing blocks and novel attention-based residual blocks. The network takes advantage of the macro-pixel (MP) structure, specific to LF images, and processes each reconstructed MP in the luminance (Y) channel. The input patch is represented as a tensor that collects, from an MP neighbourhood, four Epipolar Plane Images (EPIs) at four different angles. The experimental results on a common LF image database showed high improvements over HEVC in terms of the structural similarity index (SSIM), with an average Y-Bjøntegaard Delta (BD)-rate savings of 36.57%, and an average Y-BD-PSNR improvement of 2.301 dB. Increased performance was achieved when the HEVC built-in filtering methods were skipped. The visual results illustrate that the enhanced image contains sharper edges and more texture details. The ablation study provides two robust solutions to reduce the inference time by 44.6% and the network complexity by 74.7%. The results demonstrate the potential of attention networks for the quality enhancement of LF images encoded by HEVC.
Keywords: attention network; light field images; quality enhancement; video coding.