Stereo image compression using wavelet coefficients morphology

In this paper, we propose a new stereo image compression scheme that is based on the wavelet transform of both images and the disparity estimation between the stereo pair subbands. The two images are decomposed by using a Discrete Wavelet Transform (DWT) and coded by employing the morphological representation of the wavelet coefficients, which is a technique that exploits the intraband-interband statistical properties of them. The progressive pixel-to-pixel evaluation of the disparity has been incorporated to the morphological coder so that a dense disparity field to be formed for every subband. The proposed method demonstrates very good performance as far as PSNR measures and visual quality are concerned and low complexity. (C) 2003 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.