Compression of still multiview images for 3-D automultiscopic spatially-multiplexed displays

摘要

Automultiscopic (no glasses, multiview) displays are becoming a viable alternative to 3-D displays with glasses. However, since these displays require multiple views the needed transmission bit rate as well as storage space are of concern. In this paper, we describe results of our research on the compression of still multiview images for display on lenticular or parallax-barrier screens. In one approach, we examine compression of multiplexed images that, unfortunately, have relatively low spatial correlation and thus are difficult to compress. We also study compression/decompression of individual views followed by multiplexing at the receiver. However, instead of using full-resolution views, we apply compression to band-limited and downsampled views in the so-called "N-tile format". Using lower resolution images is acceptable since multiplexing at the receiver involves downsampling from full view resolution anyway. We use three standard compression techniques: JPEG, JPEG-2000 and H.264. While both JPEG standards work with still images and can be applied directly to an N-tile image, H.264, a video compression standard, requires N images of the N-tile format to be treated as a short video sequence. We present numerous experimental results indicating that the H.264 approach achieves significantly better performance than the other three approaches studied.