Multiview Video Coding Based on Wavelet Pyramids

In this paper, we propose a scalable multiview video coding (MVC) algorithm based on Wavelet Pyramids and Set Partitioning in Hierarchical Tree (SPIHT) codec. This algorithm first uses the Mallat pyramid method to decompose the original images into subband of different scales, and then follows the usual phase matching method to conduct disparity estimation from the order of coarse to fine. To solve the problem of heavy computational complexity caused by the large amount of information in multiview sequences, we jointly take the parallax estimation and motion estimation subject to stereoscopic constraints. Finally after SPIHT coding, the wavelet transform coefficients are divided into multiple independent sub-streams for transferring. Simulation results on different video sequences show that the proposed method realizes low encoding complexity at the encoder and achieves efficient performance of multiview video compression.