Dense disparity map representations for stereo image coding

Abstract

Marne-la-Vallée, France pesquet@univ-mlv.fr ABSTRACTResearch in stereo image coding has focused on the disparity estimation/compensation process to exploit the cross-view redundancies.Most of the reported methods use a classical block-based technique in order to estimate the disparity field. However, this estimation technique does not always provide an accurate disparity map, which may affect the disparity compensation step. In this paper, we propose to use an estimation method that produces a dense and smooth disparity map. Then, on the one hand, this map is segmented and efficiently coded by exploiting the high correlation between neighboring disparity values. On the other hand, we integrate the disparity information into a vector lifting scheme for stereo image coding. Experimental results indicate that the proposed coding scheme outperforms the conventional methods employing a block-based disparity estimation.Index Terms-disparity estimation, dense disparity map, stereoscopic image coding, vector lifting scheme.

Proximal splitting methods for depth estimation

“…A straightforward approach consists of independently coding each image by using existing still image coders. However, most of the existing works rely on disparity compensation techniques [1]. The first step in these techniques consists of estimating the disparity map.…”

“…In this context, DDE raises an important problem: the cost of transmission/storage of the disparity field in terms of bitrate. In order to alleviate this problem, we apply a quadtree coding of the estimated dense maps [1]. Fig.…”

“…The displacement between the pixel coordinates of these points is called disparity. This information plays a crucial role in many application fields such as 3D reconstruction, intermediate view synthesis, obstacle detection, and stereo/multiview image compression [1]. The disparity estimation problem has been extensively studied in computer vision [2].…”

Lossless Compression of Stereo Disparity Maps for 3D

“…However, the improvement gap is not significant enough to motivate the increase of complexity due to motion estimation, especially at low and medium resolutions. The reasons for such a small average improvement are two: first, the H.264/AVC architecture has been developed and optimized for efficient lossy coding of video data and therefore lossless performance have not been considered as a main focus; second, it has been shown in the literature [19] that blockbased motion estimation does not represent an optimal way to handle changes due to disparity.…”