Region-based fractal coding of stereo video sequences with quadtree-based disparity compensation

In order to realize the efficient and economical transmission/storage of stereo video sequences and also the region-based functionality of MPEG-4, we propose a new stereo video sequence compression scheme which uses fractal coding and encodes each region independently by a prior image segmentation map (alpha plane) which is exactly the same as in MPEG-4. We encode the first n frames of the right video sequence as a "set" using the circular prediction mapping (CPM) method and encoding the remaining frames using the non contractive interframe mapping (NCIM) method. The CPM and NCIM methods accomplish the motion estimation/compensation which can exploit the high temporal correlations between adjacent frames of the right sequence; at the same time, we exploit the spatial correlations between the left and right frames by searching for similar blocks using quadtree-based disparity estimation/compensation. The experimental results indicate that we get a high compression ratio and also good PSNR.