With the advances of display technology, three- dimensional (3-D) imaging systems are becoming increasingly popular. One way of stimulating 3-D perception is to use stereo pairs, a pair of images of the same scene acquired from different perspectives. Since there is an inherent redundancy between the images of a stereo pairs, data compression algorithms should be employed to represent stereo pairs efficiently. The proposed techniques generally use block-based disparity compensation. In order to get the higher compression ratio, this paper employs the wavelet-based mixed-resolution coding technique to incorporate with SPT-based disparity-compensation to compress the stereo image data. The mixed-resolution coding is a perceptually justified technique that is achieved by presenting one eye with a low-resolution image and the other with a high-resolution image. Psychophysical experiments show that the stereo image pairs with one high-resolution image and one low-resolution image provide almost the same stereo depth to that of a stereo image with two high-resolution images. By combining the mixed-resolution coding and SPT-based disparity-compensation techniques, one reference (left) high-resolution image can be compressed by a hierarchical wavelet transform followed by vector quantization and Huffman encoder. After two level wavelet decompositions, for the lowresolution right image and low-resolution left image, subspace projection technique using the fixed block size disparity compensation estimation is used. At the decoder, the low-resolution right subimage is estimated using the disparity from the low-resolution left subimage. A full-size reconstruction is obtained by upsampling a factor of 4 and reconstructing with the synthesis low pass filter. Finally, experimental results are presented, which show that our scheme achieves a PSNR gain (about 0.92dB) as compared to the current block-based disparity compensation coding techniques.
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