Bit-Plane Coding in Extractable Source Coding: Optimality, Modeling, and Application to 360° Data

In extractable source coding, multiple correlated sources are jointly compressed but can be individually accessed in the compressed domain. Performance is measured in terms of storage and transmission rates. This problem has multiple applications in interactive video compression such as Free Viewpoint Television or navigation in 360° videos. In this letter, we analyze and improve a practical coding scheme. We consider a binarized coding scheme, which insures a low decoding complexity. First, we show that binarization does not impact the transmission rate but only slightly the storage with respect to a symbol based approach. Second, we propose a Q-ary symmetric model to represent the pairwise joint distribution of the sources instead of the widely used Laplacian model. Third, we introduce a novel pre-estimation strategy, which allows to infer the symbols of some bit planes without any additional data and therefore permits to reduce the storage and transmission rates. In the context of 360° images, the proposed scheme allows to save 14% and 34% bitrate in storage and transmission rates respectively.