Region-based stereo image coding

A region-based stereo image coding algorithm is proposed and evaluated. Three types of regions are considered: occlusion, edge and smooth regions. The region in the right image that is occluded due to finite viewing area is estimated using a new approach. This region is independently coded. The non-occluded region is segmented into edge and smooth regions. Each region is composed of fixed size blocks. The disparity for each block in a non-occluded region is estimated using a block-based approach. The estimated disparity field is encoded employing a lossy residual uniform scalar quantizer and an adaptive arithmetic coder based on the segmentation information. The decoded vectors are used for the subspace projection technique, which is a combined disparity and illumination compensation algorithm. The proposed approach is shown to outperform standard block-based and independent coding algorithms.