Compression of stereoscopic images using pyramid and prune DCT encoding

This paper details a compression system for stereoscopic (3-D) images that takes advantage of the disparity compensation effect by heavily compressing one image and a lightly compressing the other. Two methods were tried for the creation of the heavily compressed image: Lossy Pyramid coding and Pruned Discrete Cosine Transform (PDCT) with Variable Length Coding VLC. Both versions of the program used a lightly quantized PDCT image for the ''clear'' image. A detailed explanation of the algorithms, the effect of compression level, and the effect of compression method on stereoscopic perception is presented. A method of creating a pseudo 3-D image from a single image is also discussed.