Optimal optical flow based disparity map estimation for lossless stereo image coding

In dependent stereo image compression, the aim is to minimize the bitrate of disparity map and that of residual image. Traditionally, focus has been paid on either disparity map or residual image. In this paper, we compute an optimal disparity map (in terms of bitrates) by jointly exploiting the trade-off between the disparity map and the residual image. Firstly, the dense disparity map is obtained using existing optical flow technique. Secondly, the dense disparity map is quantized using a RD framework. Consequently, the resulting bitrate of the disparity map decreases significantly at the cost of a slight increase of the bitrate of the residual image. As a result, the overall bitrate attains minimum value. The proposed scheme is compatible and can be integrated in JPEG2000 framework