Angular Disparity Map: A Scalable Perceptual-Based Representation of Binocular Disparity

This work addresses the data representation and the compression issues of angular disparity map following the way of HVS to perceive depth information. The continued fraction is utilized to represent the angular disparity map which enables the use of the state-of-the-art video codec (e.g. HEVC) to compress the data directly and maintains quality scalability properties. We observe that there is a non-monotonic phenomenon of the RD curves by applying HEVC compression to angular disparity map directly. This implies that the correlations among inter-layer (i.e., the neighboring integers in (2)) do not follow the traditional models of normal 2D video codecs. Of course, the detailed relationship between the sensitivities and the quantization errors of the newly proposed representation needs in depth further derivations. There are many interesting research issues may be introduced by the proposed data format (e.g., the sensitivities to quantization errors of θ and the rate-distortion optimization scheme for θ) which will, of course, be the research topics of our future work. We expect this work can be a bridge to connect the 3D perception and the 3D compression research fields.