L1-optimized linear prediction for light field image compression

The advent of consumer-level plenoptic cameras has sparkled the interest towards the design of efficient compression techniques for light field images. State-of-the-art compression systems such as HEVC prove to be inefficient when directly applied on this type of data due to the inherent spatial discontinuities among neighboring microlens images. In this paper, a novel light field image compression system is proposed. The disk-shaped pixel clusters corresponding to each microlens in the light field image are efficiently predicted based on the neighboring disks. In this context, an optimized linear prediction design based on L1 minimization of the residuals is proposed. K-means clustering is employed on training data in order to determine the optimized set of predictors. The experimental results on an extensive set of light field images demonstrate that the proposed coding scheme yields an average of 2.93 dB and 3.22 dB gain in PSNR, and 52.67% and 57.27% average rate savings compared to HEVC and JPEG2000 respectively.