Compression and Representation of 3-D Images

摘要

This paper surveys the results of various stud- ies on 3-D image coding. Themes are focused on efficient com- pression and display-independent representation of 3-D images. Most of the works on 3-D image coding have been concentrated on the compression methods tuned for each of the 3-D image for- mats (stereo pairs, multi-view images, volumetric images, holo- grams and so on). For the compression of stereo images, several techniques concerned with the concept of disparity compensation have been developed. For the compression of multi-view images, the concepts of disparity compensation and epipolar plane image (EPI) are the efficient ways of exploiting redundancies between multiple views. These techniques, however, heavily depend on the limited camera configurations. In order to consider many other multi-view configurations and other types of 3-D images comprehensively, more general platform for the 3-D image repre- sentation is introduced, aiming to outgrow the framework of 3-D ``image'' communication and to open up a novel field of technol- ogy, which should be called the ``spatial'' communication. Espe- cially, the light ray based method has a wide range of application, including efficient transmission of the physical world, as well as integration of the virtual and physical worlds.