Data compression for light-field rendering

Two light-field compression schemes are presented. The codecs are compared with regard to compression efficiency and rendering performance. The first proposed coder is based on video-compression techniques that have been modified to code the four-dimensional light-field data structure efficiently. The second coder relies entirely on disparity-compensated image prediction, establishing a hierarchical structure among the light-field images. Coding performance of both schemes is evaluated using publicly available light fields of synthetic, as well as real-world, scenes. Compression ratios vary between 100 : 1 and 2000 : 1, depending on reconstruction quality and light-field scene characteristics.