Integral 3D image coding by using multiview video compression technologies

Effective compression technology is required to reduce the huge amount of information for integral three-dimensional (3D) television. For compressing an integral 3D image, we propose a compression method of converting elemental images to multiview images and of applying multiview video coding to part of the multiview images and their depth maps. In this method, the relationship between the number of the part of the multiview images and the image quality degradation of a reconstructed 3D image was studied by subjective evaluation experiment, and we confirmed the amount of information required for displaying an acceptable reconstructed 3D image. As a result, the reconstructed 3D images with acceptable image quality were obtained with about 2/9 times the amount of information for coding all the multiview images converted from the elemental images.