Mh. Kim et Kh. Sohn, Edge-preserving directional regularization technique for disparity estimation of steroscopic images, IEEE CONS E, 45(3), 1999, pp. 804-811
Recently, due to the advances in visual technology, three dimensional(3D) i
maging systems are becoming popular. One way of stimulating 3D perception i
s to use stereo pairs, a pair of images of the same scene acquired from dif
ferent perspectives. Since there is an inherent redundancy between the imag
es of a stereo pair; data compression algorithms should be employed to effi
ciently represent stereo pairs. Disparity estimation of stereoscopic image
is an important stage for the stereo image compression. We propose a new di
sparity estimation method using a directional regularization technique to p
reserve edges well for stereoscopic image coding This method smooths dispar
ity vectors in smooth regions and preserves edges ill object boundaries wit
hout over-smoothing problem. The experimental results show that the propose
d method achieves close matches between a left image and a right image as w
ell as the improved coding efficiency. We use DPCM technique followed by th
e Huffman entropy, coding for disparity map coding. In addition, the propos
ed disparity estimation method can be applied to the high-quality intermedi
ate view reconstruction.