Multi-view image compression and intermediate view synthesis for stereoscopic applications

A multi-view image compression system that is capable of providing sufficient and reliable disparity information for intermediate view synthesis is proposed in this paper for 3-D virtual reality applications. In the first part of this paper, we develop a codec that features random access to any encoded view. The codec performance is good and comparable to the MPEG standard. In the second part, we interpolate the disparities and refer to appropriate decoded images for the synthesis of any intermediate views. Our design provides enough information so that each synthesis can be achieved within 0.04 sec for a 320/spl times/240 image (excluding the decoding time). An eye glass viewer with infrared synchronization is also adopted to view the stereo results which are very good.