Light Field Coding Using Weighted Binary Images

抄録

We propose an efficient coding scheme for a dense light field, i.e., a set of multi-viewpoint images taken with very small viewpoint intervals. The key idea behind our proposal is that a light field is represented using only weighted binary images, where several binary images and corresponding weight values are chosen so as to optimally approximate the light field. The proposed coding scheme is completely different from those of modern image/video coding standards that involve more complex procedures such as intra/inter-frame prediction and transforms. One advantage of our method is the extreme simplicity of the decoding process, which will lead to a faster and less power-hungry decoder than those of the standard codecs. Another useful aspect of our proposal is that our coding method can be made scalable, where the accuracy of the decoded light field is improved in a progressive manner as we use more encoded information. Thanks to the divide-and-conquer strategy adopted for the scalable coding, we can also substantially reduce the computational complexity of the encoding process. Although our method is still in the early research phase, experimental results demonstrated that it achieves reasonable rate-distortion performances compared with those of the standard video codecs.