Perceptual coding of stereo endoscopy video for minimally invasive surgery

In this paper, we propose a compression scheme that is tailored for stereo-laparoscope sequences. The inter-frame correlation is modeled by the deformation field obtained by elastic registration between two subsequent frames and exploited for prediction of the left sequence. The right sequence is lossy encoded by prediction from the corresponding left images. Wavelet-based coding is applied to both the deformation vector fields and residual images. The resulting system supports spatio temporal scalability, while providing lossless performance. The implementation of the wavelet transform by integer lifting ensures a low computational complexity, thus reducing the required run-time memory allocation and on line implementation. Extensive psychovisual tests were performed for system validation and characterization with respect to the MPEG4 standard for video coding. Results are very encouraging: the PSVC system features the functionalities making it suitable for PACS while providing a good trade-off between usability and performance in lossy mode.