Hierarchical coding of light fields with disparity maps

A coder for light fields is presented. Due to the large amount of data needed to represent a complete light field, a hierarchical decomposition is employed. The full light field is built up by recursively predicting intermediate images from a small subset of light-field images. Intermediate images are predicted by disparity-compensating multiple surrounding images. The predicted images are refined using DCT coding. Rate-distortion measurements for two standard light fields verify the efficiency of the proposed scheme. Compression ratios of 1000:1 are achieved at acceptable quality of the rendered views.