With the advent of light field acquisition technologies, the captured information of the scene is enriched by having both angular and spatial information. The captured information provides additional capabilities in the post processing stage, e.g. refocusing, 3D scene reconstruction, synthetic aperture etc. Light field capturing devices are classified in two categories. In the first category, a single plenoptic camera is used to capture a densely sampled light field, and in second category, multiple traditional cameras are used to capture a sparsely sampled light field. In both cases, the size of captured data increases with the additional angular information. The recent call for proposal related to compression of light field data by Joint Picture Expert Group (JPEG), also called JPEG Pleno, reflects the need of a new and efficient light field compression solution. In this paper, we propose a compression solution for sparsely sampled light field data. Each view of multi-camera system is interpreted as a frame of multi-view sequences. The pseudo multi-view sequences are compressed using state-ofart Multiview-extension of High Efficiency Video Coding (MV-HEVC). A subset of four light field images from Stanford dataset are compressed, on four bit-rates in order to cover the low to high bit-rates scenarios. The comparison is made with state-of-art reference encoder HEVC and its real-time implementation x265. The rate distortion analysis shows that the proposed compression scheme outperforms both reference schemes in all tested bit-rate scenarios for all the test images. The average BD-PSNR gain of 1.36 dB over HEVC and 2.15 dB over x265 is achieved using the proposed compression scheme.
For example, Ahmed et al. treated views from multi-camera system as frames of a multiview sequence, and compressed them using the Multiview extension of High Efficiency Video Coding REF .
Compression scheme for sparsely sampled light field data based on pseudo multi-view sequences
Photonics Europe
Engineering Computer Science