A wavelet multiresolution compression technique for 3D stereoscopic image sequence based on mixed-resolution psychophysical experiments

Abstract

Three-dimensional visual communications, made through the use of stereoscopic images, are able to achieve total display realism. In order to create a 3D system with two images (left and right) that should be transmitted simultaneously, the large amount of information contained in the images should be reduced, and an efficient coding appropriate for stereoscopic images is developed. Stereoscopic image sequence compression involves the exploitation of the spatial redundancy between the left and right image frames to achieve the compression ratio higher than that are by the independent compression of the two frames. In order to further achieve the higher compression ratio, in this paper, we employ the mixed-resolution psychophysical experiments to the stereo image compression. The experiments have shown that a stereo image pair with one high-resolution image and one lower-resolution image is sufficient to provide good stereoscopic depth perception. Thus, one image sequence is compressed independent of the other sequence using the motion compensation, while the other sequence is estimated at a lower resolution from this stream using the low-resolution disparity compensation. To implement the mixed-resolution coding, a wavelet multiresolution framework has been adopted to facilitate such an estimation of motion and disparity vectors at different resolutions. Experimental results indicate that the compression ratio for a typical stereoscopic image sequence is about 90, without any significant loss in the perceived 3D stereoscopic image quality.