Sparse Light Field Sampling Improves Casual 3D and 4D Reconstruction
Shamus Li, Ruiming Cao, Laura Waller, Kristina Monakhova, Sara Fridovich-Keil
Abstract
Many consumer smartphones, stereo cameras, and light field cameras record multiple synchronized viewpoints in a single exposure event. However, novel view synthesis pipelines commonly use only a monocular stream and rely on camera motion or learned priors to obtain angular coverage. In this paper, we ask: why do we use only one viewpoint? We analyze sensor-limited multi-view, where one sensor trades off spatial and angular resolution, and exposure-limited multi-view, where multiple sensors on one commodity device observe each event simultaneously. We introduce a new dataset incorporating three types of commodity multi-view cameras, and evaluate sparse-view 3DGS and 4DGS baselines measuring reconstruction quality as a function of number of exposures and angle between extreme views. Our results demonstrate that using multiple cameras, even with a low baseline, significantly improves reconstruction quality in single-shot, few-shot, and casual video settings. In addition, under a fixed sensor budget, angular sampling improves reconstruction when exposures are scarce despite lower spatial resolution. The gains are most pronounced for single-shot and dynamic scenes, where a stationary monocular camera lacks the angular diversity to recover scene geometry and motion.
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Classified with taxonomy v2 on Sat, 5 Sept 2026.