View-Dependent Coding of Light Fields Based on Free-Viewpoint Image Synthesis

This paper proposes a view-dependent light field coding scheme using some image-based rendering techniques prior to coding. The proposed coder first synthesizes an image at a given viewpoint, which is called a representative viewpoint, and then predicts all input images by using the synthesized image as a reference. It can produce a view-dependent scalable bitstream. This means that the quality of synthesized views around the representative viewpoint is kept high even at extremely low bit rates, and the quality of views away from there is improved according to the increase of the bit rate. Our experimental results show that this coding scheme also achieves good coding efficiency for both multi-camera images and integral photography, which are common light field representations.