Evaluation of disparity map characteristics for stereo image coding

In order to compress stereo image pairs effectively, disparity compensation is the most widely used method. In this paper we examined the effects of using different disparity maps and their properties in an embedded JPEG2000 based disparity compensated stereo image coder. These properties include the block size, estimation method and the resulting entropy of the disparity map. Experimental results show that basic block matching gives better results than ground truth, especially on occluded regions and boundaries.