Rebinning methods and arrangements for use in compressing image-based rendering (IBR) data

Abstract

Rebinning methods and arrangements are provided that significantly improve the 3D wavelet compression performance of the image based rendering data, such as, e.g., concentric mosaic image data. Through what is essentially a selective cutting and pasting process the image data is divided into stripes that are then used to form a set of multi-perspective panoramas. The rebinning process greatly improves the performance of the cross shot filtering, and thus improves the transform and coding efficiency of 3D wavelet codecs. While the region of support after rebinning may cease to be rectangular in some cases, a padding scheme and an arbitrary shape wavelet coder can be implemented to encode the result data volume of the smart rebinning. With an arbitrary shape wavelet codec, the rebinning outperforms MPEG-2 by 3.7 dB, outperforms direct 3D wavelet coder by 4.3 dB, and outperforms a reference block coder (RBC) by 3.2 dB on certain tested concentric mosaic image scenes. Hence, the rebinning process nearly quadruples the compression ratio for selected scenes. Additional methods and arrangements are provided that include selectively dividing the image data into slits and rebinning the slits into a huge 2D array, which is then compressed using conventional still image codecs, such as, JPEG.

1 . A method comprising: 
 providing a plurality of concentric mosaic image data;    determining at least one displacement vector associated with the plurality of concentric mosaic image data;    de-correlating the plurality of concentric mosaic image data along a cross-shot direction based on said at least one displacement vector to form a skewed data set; and    rebinning portions of the skewed data set to form a multi-perspective panorama by subdividing the concentric mosaic image data based on the displacement vector and combining specific portions of the concentric mosaic image data to form at least a portion of the multi-perspective panorama.    
   
   
       2 . A method comprising: 
 providing concentric mosaic image data;    determining at least one displacement vector associated with a horizontal filtering of the concentric mosaic image data;    dividing the concentric mosaic image data into stripes according to said at least one displacement vector; and    rebinning portions of said striped concentric mosaic data to form at least a portion of a multi-perspective panorama.    
   
   
       3 . A method comprising: 
 providing a plurality of concentric mosaic image data;    determining at least one displacement vector associated with the plurality of concentric mosaic image data;    dividing each of the plurality of concentric mosaic image data into slits based on the displacement vector;    rebinning all of the slits into a two-dimensional array by combining specific portions of the concentric mosaic image data to form at least a portion of the two-dimensional array; and    compressing the two-dimensional array.