Plenoptic Image Coding Using Macropixel-Based Intra Prediction

The plenoptic image in a super high resolution is composed of a number of macropixels recording both spatial and angular light radiance. Based on the analysis of spatial correlations of macropixel structure, this paper proposes a macropixel-based intra prediction method for plenoptic image coding. After applying an invertible image reshaping method to the plenoptic image, the macropixel structures are aligned with the coding unit grids of a block-based video coding standard. The reshaped and regularized image is compressed by the video encoder comprising the proposed macropixel-based intra prediction, which includes three modes: multi-block weighted prediction mode (MWP); co-located single-block prediction mode; and boundary matching-based prediction mode (BMP). In the MWP mode and BMP mode, the predictions are generated by minimizing spatial Euclidean distance and boundary error among the reference samples, respectively, which can fully exploit spatial correlations among the pixels beneath the neighboring microlens. The proposed approach outperforms high-efficiency video coding standard by an average of 47.0% Nitrate reduction. Compared with other state-of-the-art methods, such as pseudo-video based on tiling and arrangement method, intra block copy mode, and locally linear embedding-based prediction, it can also achieve 45.0%, 27.7%, and 22.7% bitrate savings on average, respectively.