Transform domain overlapped block disparity compensation in wavelet coding of stereo image pairs

In this paper we propose a stereo image CODEC, that uses overlapped block disparity estimation/compensation in multiresolution wavelet transform domain. Overlapped block matching is known to be able to reduce blocking artifacts by linearly combining multiple blocks provided by the disparity vectors of a block and its neighbours. This capability of OBM and discrete wavelet transform´s (DWT) versatile time-frequency localization is expected to improve rate distortion performance. With the proposed CODEC gains of up to 1 dB at low bit rates as compared to the benchmark of S. Sethuraman et al. (1994) used in the paper.