Analysis of inter-slice correlations in ray space and its applications to data compression

Ray space representation is the main approach to realizing free viewpoint television (FTV) of complex scene. Data compression in ray space is one of key technologies in FTV. Up to now, some methods, such as Fujii's work which are similar to still image coding techniques, were used to reduce redundancy in ray space. In this paper, a new concept of "slice" in ray space is presented to probe into new efficient approaches to data compression in ray space and the correlations between adjacent slices, called as inter-slice correlations, are analyzed. The analytical results indicate that more efficient methods of data compression in ray space can be obtained based on the inter-slice correlations. Some experiments are implemented, in which the inter-slice correlations are also used to prediction and compensation in data compression in ray space. Experimental results show that the proposed compression method with the inter-slice correlations is quite effective.