Coding of multi-view images for immersive viewing

A light field is a collection of multi-view images which represent a 3-D scene. Rendering from a light field provides a simple and efficient way to generate arbitrary new views of the scene as the viewing position and angle change, thus offering the experience of immersive viewing. The enormous amount of data required in a light field (typically on the order of tens or hundreds of megabytes and in some cases even gigabytes) poses a key challenge in rendering. Tree-structured vector quantization (TSVQ) provides moderate compression ratio, which alleviates but does not solve the problem. Compression schemes based on video coding techniques exploit the data redundancy very effectively but do not provide adequate random access for rendering. This paper describes a hierarchical compression scheme based on disparity compensated prediction, which provides a high compression ratio while offering fast random access. More information is available at http://www-ise.stanford.edu/~xin/lf