Compression of Concentric Mosaic Scenery with Alignment and 3D Wavelet Transform

As a new scene representation scheme, the concentric mosaic offers a quick way to capture and model a realistic 3D environment. This is achieved by shooting a lot of photos of the scene. Novel views can be rendered by patching vertical slits of the captured shots. The data amount in the concentric mosaic is huge. In this work, we compress the concentric mosaic image array with a 3D wavelet scheme. The proposed scheme first aligns the mosaic images, and then applies a 3D wavelet transform on the aligned mosaic image array. After that, the wavelet coefficients in each subband are split into cubes, where each of the cubes is encoded independently with an embedded block coder. Various cube bitstreams are then assembled to form the final compressed bitstream. Experimental result shows that the proposed 3D wavelet coder achieves a good compression performance.