RLFC: Random Access Light Field Compression using Key Views
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We present a new hierarchical based compression scheme for encoding light field images (LFI) suitable for interactive rendering. Our method (RLFC) exploits redundancies in the light field representation by constructing a hierarchical tree structure. The top-level (root) of the tree captures the common high-level details across the LFI, and other levels (children) of the tree capture specific low-level details of LFI. Our decompressing algorithm corresponds to a tree traversal operation, which gathers the values stored at different levels of the tree. Our approach provides random access with one level of indirection, parallel decoding, and enables fast interactive rendering. We have implemented our method for 4D two plane parameterized light fields. The compression rates vary from 0.1 - 3 bits per pixel (bpp), resulting in compression ratios of around 200:1 to 10:1 for PSNR quality of 35 to 50 dB. As compared to prior random access schemes, we observe 5-10X improvement in compression rate for similar PSNR quality. The decompression times for decoding the required blocks of LFI are approximately 2 - 5 microseconds and average time to compute a pixel in the new rendered view is 15 - 20 microseconds . Our overall scheme is simple to implement and involves memory operations, bit manipulations, and arithmetic operations.
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