Delaunay Triangulation Model-Based Stereo Image Coding

Compression of stereo image is important since its data is in double size compared with the corresponding non-stereo image in terms of storage and transmission.Through an analysis to the processing stages of stereo image coding based on Delaunay triangulation model,a disparity estimation algorithm,capable of maintaining the topology structure of the mesh,is proposed.The algorithm is implemented by a three-stage iterative process.At the first stage,an iterative block matching algorithm is applied to generate more accurate initial disparity vectors,and at the second stage,an iterative polygon matching algorithm is employed to optimize the initial disparity vectors obtained at the first stage to minimize the error of certain triangulations.Finally at the third stage,the unreliable nodes are deleted.Variable length code is used to encode the mesh nodes and disparity vectors,and the residual image is coded with DCT.Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can provide better subjective and objective quality compared with the conventional block coding scheme and other mesh-based matching methods under a comparable high compression ratio.