Zerotree-based stereoscopic video CODEC

Abstract

Due to the provision of a more natural representation of a scene in the form of left and right eye views, a stereoscopic imaging system provides a more effective method for image/video display. Unfortunately the vast amount of information that must be transmitted/stored to represent a stereo image pair/video sequence, has so far hindered its use in commercial applications. However, by properly exploiting the spatial, temporal and binocular redundancy, a stereo image pair or a sequence could be compressed and transmitted through a single monocular channel's bandwidth without unduly sacrificing the perceived stereoscopic image quality. We propose a timely and novel framework to transmit stereoscopic data efficiently. We propose a timely and novel framework to transmit stereoscopic data efficiently. We present a new technique for coding stereo video sequences based on discrete wavelet transform (DWT) technology. The proposed technique particularly exploits zerotree entropy (ZTE) coding that makes use of the wavelet block concept to achieve low bit rate stereo video coding. One of the two image streams, namely, the main stream, is independently coded by a zerotree video CODEC, while the second stream, namely, the auxiliary stream, is predicted based on disparity compensation. A zerotree video CODEC subsequently codes the residual stream. We compare the performance of the proposed CODEC with a discrete cosine transform (DCT)-based, modified MPEG-2 stereo video CODEC. We show that the proposed CODEC outperforms the benchmark CODEC in coding both main and auxiliary streams.