Light field compression with homography-based low-rank approximation

Abstract

This paper describes a light field compression scheme based on a novel homography-based low-rank approximation method called HLRA. The HLRA method jointly searches for the set of homographies best aligning the light field views and for the low-rank approximation matrices. The light field views are aligned using either one global homography or multiple homographies depending on how much the disparity across views varies from one depth plane to the other. The light field low-rank representation is then compressed using high efficiency video coding (HEVC). The best pair of rank and quantization parameters of the coding scheme, for a given target bit rate, is predicted with a model defined as a function of light field disparity and texture features. The results are compared with those obtained by directly applying HEVC on the light field views restructured as a pseudovideo sequence. The experiments using different datasets show substantial peak signal to noise ratio (PSNR)-rate gain of our compression algorithm, as well as the accuracy of the proposed parameter prediction model, especially for real light fields. A scalable extension of the coding scheme is finally proposed.