A wavelet based stereo image coding algorithm

Stereo image pair coding is an important issue in stereo data compression. A wavelet based stereo image pair coding algorithm is proposed in this paper. The wavelet transform is used to decompose the image into an approximation image and three edge images. In the wavelet domain, a disparity estimation technique is developed to estimate the disparity field using both approximation image and edge images. To improve the accuracy of estimation of wavelet images produced by the disparity compensation technique, a novel wavelet based subspace projection technique (SPT) is developed. In the SPT, the block dependent subspaces are constructed using block varying basis vectors that are derived from the disparity compensated wavelet images. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm is efficient to achieve stereo image compression.