Integral image compression based on optical characteristic

The large amount of image data from the captured three-dimensional integral image requires to be presented with adequate resolution. It is therefore necessary to develop compression algorithms that take advantage of the characteristics of the recorded integral image. In this study, the authors propose a new compression method that is adapted to integral imaging. According to the optical characteristics of integral imaging, most of the information of each elemental image is overlapped with that of its adjacent elemental images. Thus, the method is to achieve image compression by taking a sample from the elemental image sequence for every m elemental image to get image compression. Experimental results that are presented to illustrate the proposed compression technique prove that the proposed technique can improve the compression ratio of integral imaging.