Improved Light Field Compression Efficiency through BM3D-Based Denoising Using Inter-View Correlation

Multi-view or light field images have recently gained much attraction from academic and commercial fields to create breakthroughs that go beyond simple video-watching experiences. Immersive virtual reality is an important example. High image quality is essential in systems with a near-eye display device. The compression efficiency is also critical because a large amount of multi-view data needs to be stored and transferred. However, noise can be easily generated during image capturing, and these noisy images severely deteriorate both the quality of experience and the compression efficiency. Therefore, denoising is a prerequisite to produce multi-view-based image contents. In this paper, the structural characteristics of linear multi-view images are fully utilized to increase the denoising speed and performance as well as to improve the compression efficiency. Assuming the sequential processes of denoising and compression, multi-view geometry-based denoising is performed keeping the temporal correlation among views. Experimental results show the proposed scheme significantly improves the compression efficiency of denoised views up to 76.05%, maintaining good denoising quality compared to the popular conventional denoise algorithms.