Performance analysis of stereo coding algorithms

We discuss several techniques for stereo image coding. These techniques include those that are directly adapted from motion compensation such as disparity compensation, windowed disparity compensation, and variable block size disparity compensation (quadtree decomposition) as well as a novel stereo coding algorithm that we have previously proposed, namely the subspace projection technique (SPT). Also, combined techniques such as windowed disparity compensation followed by the SPT or variable block size disparity compensation followed by the SPT are implemented. In addition, improvements and modifications for the subspace projection technique are reported. These improvements include a non-statistical significance test for the subspace coefficients, two different implementations of the basic algorithm, a locally optimal bit-allocation scheme, and a new quantization scheme for the projection coefficients. In addition, we compare the rate-distortion performance of our approach to several stereo coding algorithms.