Extended map estimation algorithm using joint entropy-distortion metric for non-rectified stereoscopic images

This paper deals with the disparity map estimation problem to encode non-rectified stereoscopic images. This encoding issue is considered as a trade-off between the quality of the predicted view and the bit-rate required to encode the estimated disparity map. A sub-optimal optimization algorithm, known as Modified-M-Algorithm, based on an entropy-distortion metric has already been proposed specifically for rectified stereoscopic images. Indeed the selected disparities reduce not only the distortion of the predicted image but also the entropy of the estimated disparity map under a low computational complexity. An extension of this strategy is proposed to non-rectified stereoscopic images. Simulation results confirm that our extended algorithm still achieves better rate-distortion performance than the traditional block-matching algorithm. Moreover an improvement in terms of rate-distortion performance is also observed even in the case of rectified stereoscopic images.