Inter-view wavelet compression of light fields with disparity-compensated lifting

We propose a novel approach that uses disparity-compensated lifting for wavelet compression of light fields. Disparity compensation is incorporated into the lifting structure for the transform across the views to solve the irreversibility limitation in previous wavelet coding schemes. With this approach, we obtain the benefits of wavelet coding, such as scalability in all dimensions, as well as superior compression performance. For light fields of an object, shape adaptation is adopted to improve the compression efficiency and visual quality of reconstructed images. In this work we extend the scheme to handle light fields with arbitrary camera arrangements. A viewsequencing algorithm is developed to encode the images. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme outperforms existing light field compression techniques in terms of compression efficiency and visual quality of the reconstructed views.