Pioneering block based stereo image CODEC in wavelet domain

In this paper we propose the wavelet domain implementation of our original pioneering block based stereo image compression algorithm and compare its performance with traditional, DCT based and state-of-the art, DWT based stereo image compression algorithms. Due to the special requirements of the pioneering block based CODEC and the properties of DWT based multi-resolution decomposition, the implementation of the original algorithm in the wavelet domain is not straightforward and thus provides knowledge and understanding of significant novelty. Experiments were performed on a set of eight stereo image pairs representing, natural, synthetic, in-door and out-door images. We show that for the same bit rates, objective quality gains of up to 5 dB (PSNR) are obtained as compared to the benchmark algorithms. One significant property of the proposed CODEC is its ability to produce reconstructed right images of up to 25dB at right image bit rates as low as 0. 1 bpp. Significant gains in subjective image quality are also obtained as compared to benchmark methods.