Efficient intra prediction scheme for light field image compression

Interactive photo-realistic graphics can be rendered by using light field datasets. One way of capturing the dataset is by using light field cameras with microlens arrays. The captured images contain repetitive patterns resulted from adjacent mi-crolenses. These images don't resemble the appearance of a natural scene. This dissimilarity leads to problems in light field image compression by using traditional image and video encoders, which are optimized for natural images and video sequences. In this paper, we introduce the full inter-prediction scheme in HEVC into intra-prediction for the compression of light field images. The proposed scheme is capable of performing both unidirectional and bi-directional prediction within an image. The evaluation results show that above 3 dB quality improvements or above 50 percent bit-rate saving can be achieved in terms of BD-PSNR for the proposed scheme compared to the original HEVC intra-prediction for light field images.