[Optical Engineering, January 2003, pp. 182-189]
Residual Image Coding for Stereo Image Compression
Tamás Frajka and Kenneth Zeger
Abstract
One main focus of research in stereo image coding has
been disparity estimation, a technique used to reduce coding rate by
taking advantage of the redundancy in a stereo image
pair. Significantly less effort has been put into the coding of the
residual image. These images display characteristics that are
different from that of natural
images. In this paper we propose a new method for the coding
of residual images that takes into account the properties of residual
images. Particular attention is paid to the effects of occlusion and
the correlation properties of residual images that result from
block-based disparity estimation. The embedded, progressive nature of
our coder allows one to stop decoding at any time. We demonstrate
that it is possible to achieve good results with a computationally
simple method.