Compression of multi-view images

Three dimensional display of video sequences with look-around capability enhances realism and introduces a unique sense of "being there". This final step of display realism can be achieved by stereoscopic techniques with the use of multi-view image sequences. A multi-view image system is an extended stereoscopic system with look-around capability. One technical problem that keeps these systems from widespread application is the large amount of information contained in a multi-view system. This information is generally 5 to 10 times more than the information content of an image. However, there is high inter-frame correlation in a multi-view image set which can be exploited for compression purposes. Therefore, the authors investigate efficient storage and transmission techniques for multi-view images. A block-based disparity compensated coder is proposed. This proposed algorithm solves the occlusion problem and is a good candidate for real-time implementation.