View synthesis with multiplane images from computationally generated RGB-D light fields

Image based view synthesis using deep neural networks provide novel scene views from a set of captured single or multiple images. Multiplane images (MPI) represent scene content as set of RGB alpha planes within a reference view frustum and render novel views by projecting the content into the target viewpoints. Image based view synthesis with multiple images is very popularly deployed in various areas because it effectively represents geometric uncertainty in ambiguous regions and can convincingly simulate non-Lambertian effects. However, previous image based view synthesis approaches suffer from interpolating and extrapolating information in pixels or ray spaces to generate seamless novel views without occlusion. To effectively improve visual performance for view interpolation and extrapolation, this paper proposes a novel view synthesis with MPI images. From a monocular RGB image, light field images are computationally generated, the proposed depth map guided deep network produces robust MPI using the light field images and their corresponding depth images, and the MPI network embedded with depth attention blocks forces semantic and geometric information to be uniformly distributed and divided among layers. The proposed approach achieves 3.5% and 4.02% improvements in SSIM and PSNR values, comparing to the SOTA approaches. Qualitative analysis on benchmark dataset also verifies the robustness of the proposed approach.