On the Information Rate of the Plenoptic Function

We study the compression problem of visual scenes acquired with a camera for transmission or storage. Our proposed model is general and includes two well-known cases: that of video coding and that of lightfield data compression. Those two examples are related in that both are characterized by two sources of complexity: the camera motion, and the scenes being acquired. The main difference of the two is in how the complexity of the camera is coded. We propose a simplified model which includes the main characteristics of the general problem. Based on this, we do theoretical analysis, develop simple codes, and show experimental results.