Ultra low-complexity 4-D IIR hyperfan filter for light field denoising

Abstract

Denoising of four-dimensional (4-D) light fields (LFs) is a fundamental preprocessing step before employing LFs for downstream tasks. Most of LF denoising methods have higher computational complexities despite excellent performance. Denoising of LFs using 4-D linear filters is a low-complexity approach that can achieve near real-time or real-time processing. We propose an ultra low-complexity LF denoising methods using 4-D infinite-extent impulse response (IIR) hyperfan filters in this paper. Our approach exploits the sparsity of an LF in the 4-D frequency domain, and employ a set of one-dimensional and two-dimensional first-order IIR filters to approximate the 4-D hyperfan-shaped passband. On average, the proposed 4-D IIR hyperfan filter needs only 2.56 multiplications and 21.06 additions to process a LF sample leading to more than 92% and 64% savings in the number of multiplications and additions to process a LF sample compared previously proposed LF denoising methods based on 4-D linear filters with a ~1 dB deterioration in the peak-signal-to-noise ratio.