The compression of simplified dynamic light fields

This paper studies the compression of a dynamic image-based rendering (IBR) representation called simplified dynamic light fields (SDLF). It is obtained by constraining the viewpoints in a dynamic environment along a line instead of a 2D plane. The SDLFs have a dimensionality of four, which considerably simplifies their capture and data compression. A new coding algorithm for SDLFs using a modified MPEG-2 algorithm is proposed. It employs both temporal and spatial predictions from the reference video streams to explore better the redundancy among the light field images. Experimental results, using a synthetic SDLF, show that the proposed compression scheme offers a 2 dB improvement in PSNR over a similar coding scheme using only temporal prediction.