A Comprehensive Review on Light Field Occlusion Removal: Trends, Challenges, and Future Directions

Abstract

Overcoming occlusions in light field (LF) imaging is a challenging yet complex task crucial for scene understanding, image quality enhancement, and restoring visual details in obstructed scenes. This review examines contemporary occlusion removal methods, spanning from classical techniques to advanced deep learning approaches that leverage LF data’s spatial and angular dimensions. We categorize these methods into two domains: (1) single-view inpainting methods often adapted for LF contexts, and (2) specialized LF occlusion removal techniques that exploit multi-view data. The review explores how these methods mitigate occlusion artifacts and also investigates LF acquisition technologies, representations, and the role of loss functions in optimizing model performance. A discussion of publicly available datasets and performance evaluation metrics addresses the challenges of handling large occlusions. The review concludes with future research directions, emphasizing hybrid approaches, refined loss functions, and scalable solutions for LF occlusion removal.