A Novel Randomize Hierarchical Extension of MV-HEVC for Improved Light Field Compression

This paper presents a novel scheme for light field compression based on a randomize hierarchical multi-view extension of high efficiency video coding (dubbed as RH-MVHEVC). Specifically, a light field data are arranged as a multiple pseudo-temporal video sequences which are efficiently compressed with MV-HEVC encoder, following an integrated random coding technique and hierarchical prediction scheme. The critical advantage of proposed RH-MVHEVC scheme is that it utilizes not just a temporal and inter-view prediction, but efficiently exploits the strong intrinsic similarities within each sub-aperture image and among neighboring sub-aperture images in both horizontal and vertical directions. Experimental results consistently outperform the state-of-the-art compression methods on benchmark ICME 2016 and ICIP 2017 grand challenge data sets. It achieves an average up to 33.803% BD-rate reduction and 1.7978 dB BD-PSNR improvement compared with an advanced JEM video encoder, and an average 20.4156% BD-rate reduction and 2.0644 dB BD-PSNR improvement compared with a latest image-based JEM-anchor coding scheme.