Concentric mosaic compression with rebinning of slits (ROSS)

The concentric mosaic offers a solution for quick construction and easy navigation of a virtual environment. However, the huge amount of data presents a heavy burden. We propose the rebinning of slits (ROSS) for the compression of the concentric mosaic. The proposed scheme decorrelates the three-dimensional (3-D) concentric mosaic by rebinning the vertical slits of the 3-D image array into a large two-dimensional (2-D) panorama, and then it compresses the panorama with a JPEG 2000 image coder. Unlike typical video coders that use motion compensation to decorrelate multiple frames, the rebinning converts 3-D spatial correlation into stronger 2-D correlation. Experimental results show that the ROSS outperforms MPEG-2 coding of the concentric mosaic by an average of 1.0 dB.