Optimal blockwise dependent quantization for stereo image coding

Research in coding of stereo images has focused mostly on the issue of disparity estimation to exploit the redundancy between the two images in a stereo pair, with less attention being devoted to the equally important problem of allocating bits between the two images. This bit allocation problem is complicated by the dependencies arising from using a prediction based on the quantized reference images. We address the problem of blockwise bit allocation for coding of stereo images and show how, given the special characteristics of the disparity field, one can achieve an optimal solution with reasonable complexity, whereas in similar problems in motion compensated video only approximate solutions are feasible. We present algorithms based on dynamic programming that provide the optimal blockwise bit allocation. Our experiments based on a modified JPEG coder show that the proposed scheme achieves higher mean peak signal-to-noise ratio over the two frames (0.2-0.5 dB improvements) as compared with blockwise independent quantization. We also propose a fast algorithm that provides most of the gain at a fraction of the complexity