Compression of Stereo Images Using Subsampling and Transform Coding

The proposed approach to stereo image coding takes advantage of the singleness of vision property of the human visual system. A stereo image pair, in which one of the images is low-pass filtered and subsampled, is perceived stereoscopically as a sharp 3-D image. The depth information is perceived due to the stereopsis effect, and the sharpness is maintained due to the details in the nonfiltered image. Low-pass filtering, subsampling, and discrete cosine transform image coding are used for the compression of the stereo images. A methodology for the evaluation of the compression effects on the 3-D perception of compressed stereo images is presented. It is based on measurements of response time and accuracy of human subjects performing simple 3-D perception tasks.