Light Field Image Compression with Random Access

In light field compression, besides coding efficiency, providing random access to individual views is also a very significant factor. Highly efficient compression methods usually lack random access. Similarly, random access methods usually reduce the compression efficiency. To address this trade-off, a light field image encoding method is proposed in this paper which favors random access. In the proposed scheme 15x15 view images are divided into 25 independent 3x3 view images which are called Macro View Image (MVI). To encode MVIs, the central view image is used to compress its immediate neighboring view images using a hierarchical reference structure. To encode the central view of each MVI, the most central view image, along with the center of at most three MVIs, are used as the reference images for the disparity estimation. In addition, the proposed method enables the use of parallel computation to improve encoding/decoding time complexity. To reduce memory footprint in case a Region of Interest (ROI) is required, HEVC tile partitioning is used.