Balanced Distributed Coding of Omnidirectional Images

This paper presents a distributed coding scheme for the representation of 3D scenes captured by stereo omnidirectional cameras. We consider a scenario where images captured from two different viewpoints are encoded independently, with a balanced rate distribution among the different cameras. The distributed coding is built on multiresolution representation and partitioning of the visual information in each camera. The encoder transmits one partition after entropy coding, as well as the syndrome bits resulting from the channel encoding of the other partition. The decoder exploits the intra-view correlation and attempts to reconstruct the source image by combination of the entropy-coded partition and the syndrome information. At the same time, it exploits the inter-view correlation using motion estimation between images from different cameras. Experiments demonstrate that the distributed coding solution performs better than a scheme where images are handled independently, and that the coding rate stays balanced between encoders.