A Combined Pre-Processing and H.264-Compression Scheme for 3D Integral Images

The next evolutionary step in enhancing video communication fidelity is taken by adding scene depth. 3D video using integral imaging (II) is widely considered as the technique able to take this step. However, an increase in spatial resolution of several orders of magnitude from todays 2D video is required to provide a sufficient depth fidelity, which includes motion parallax. In this paper we propose a pre-processing and compression scheme that aims to enhance the compression efficiency of integral images. We first transform a still integral image into a pseudo video sequence consisting of sub-images, which is then compressed using an H.264 video encoder. The improvement in compression efficiency of using this scheme is evaluated and presented. An average PSNR increase of 5.7 dB or more, compared to JPEG 2000, is observed on a set of reference images.