Stereo image coding

An approach to stereo image coding based on disparity compensation and subspace projection is proposed and evaluated. Traditional stereo image coding techniques employing block-based disparity compensation have problems with occlusion regions and photometric variations. We show that the results of these algorithms can be improved if the subspace projection technique (SPT) is employed as a post processing technique after disparity estimation. SPT is an orthogonal basis approach. It combines block-based disparity estimation with two-dimensional first order approximation. For the regions where disparity estimation fails, such as occlusion regions, first order approximation provides a decent estimate. On the other hand, zeroth order term compensates for photometric variations. Empirical results verified that SPT performs better than the disparity compensation in the rate-distortion sense