Stereo image coding based on the binocular compensation/suppression

In this work, a wavelet-based coding scheme for stereoscopic images is presented. The proposed scheme effectively integrates the coding of the disparity map in addition to the reference image. Hence, it first calculates the wavelet transform of the left and right images. A process for detecting an optimal scale for the Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) is then applied. The sub-bands of the last retained level of the DWT are then segmented into quadtree. The disparity map is obtained by studying the similarity between the dyadic squares belonging to the left image and those of the right image. This is achieved by minimizing an energy function defined on the spatial properties of the dyadic squares. Thus, the binocular compensation/suppression process allows at this stage to take advantage of the gap existing generally between the two views. Finally, the coefficients of the reference image, the residual image and the disparity map are encoded using a quantization step followed by an entropic coding. Of course, the target image is predicted using the aforementioned content. The experimental results of the proposed approach shows a good performance compared to the literature.