With the advances of display technology, three- dimensional (3-D) imaging systems are becoming increasingly popular. One way of stimulating 3-D perception is to use stereo pairs, a pair of images of the same scene acquired from different perspectives. Since there is an inherent redundancy between the images of a stereo pairs, data compression algorithms should be employed to represent stereo pairs efficiently. The proposed techniques generally use block-based disparity compensation. In order to get the higher compression ratio, this paper employs the wavelet-based mixed-resolution coding technique to incorporate with SPT-based disparity-compensation to compress the stereo image data. The mixed-resolution coding is a perceptually justified technique that is achieved by presenting one eye with a low-resolution image and the other with a high-resolution image. Psychophysical experiments show that the stereo image pairs with one high-resolution image and one low-resolution image provide almost the same stereo depth to that of a stereo image with two high-resolution images. By combining the mixed-resolution coding and SPT-based disparity-compensation techniques, one reference (left) high-resolution image can be compressed by a hierarchical wavelet transform followed by vector quantization and Huffman encoder. After two level wavelet decompositions, for the lowresolution right image and low-resolution left image, subspace projection technique using the fixed block size disparity compensation estimation is used. At the decoder, the low-resolution right subimage is estimated using the disparity from the low-resolution left subimage. A full-size reconstruction is obtained by upsampling a factor of 4 and reconstructing with the synthesis low pass filter. Finally, experimental results are presented, which show that our scheme achieves a PSNR gain (about 0.92dB) as compared to the current block-based disparity compensation coding techniques.
Disparity is the geometrical difference between images of a stereoscopic pair. In this paper we give a comprehensive analysis of the statistical characteristics of disparity. Based on experiments, we discuss the relations between disparity, depth and object relation between block size and disparity estimation, and the influence of error criteria on disparity estimation.
AN Ping, ZHANG Zhao-yang School of Communication and Information Engineering, Shanghai University, Shanghai 200072, China
