Systems support for stereoscopic video compression

In this paper, we propose a content-based, threaded stereoscopic video compression algorithm. We believe that it is likely future stereoscopic imaging systems will contain more than two lenses, allowing the display system to optimize the stereoscopic viewing experience. Furthermore, it will allow for the adjustment of framing (scene) composition errors that can arise from stereoscopic capture. Our proposed system uses 10 linearly aligned lenses. Upon capture, the images are run through a feature detection and matching algorithm in order to determine disparity between the stereoscopic images. During compression, the disparity measurements can be used to drive the selection of key frames within the image sets to provide better retrieval of data for display.