A Hybrid Compression Method for Integral Images Using Discrete Wavelet Transform and Discrete Cosine Transform

Integral imaging (II) is a promising three-dimensional (3-D) imaging technique that uses an array of diffractive or refractive optical elements to record the 3-D information on a conventional digital sensor. With II, the object information is recorded in the form of an array of subimages, each representing a slightly different perspective of the object In order to obtain high-quality 3-D images, digital sensors with a large number of pixels are required. Consequently, high-quality II involves recording and processing large amounts of data. In this paper, we present a compression method developed for the particular characteristics of the digitally recorded integral image. The compression algorithm is based on a hybrid technique implementing a four-dimensional transform combining the discrete wavelet transform and the discrete cosine transform. The proposed algorithm outperforms the baseline JPEG compression scheme applied to II and a previous compression method developed for II based on MPEG II.