Efficient Light Field Image Coding with Depth Estimation and View Synthesis

Efficient light field image coding method is proposed based on conversion to multi-view image, depth estimation, multi-view coding, and view synthesis. Firstly, compatibility of light field image and multi-view image is discussed, and then depth estimation method based on texture-edge-aware horizontal and vertical view matching and depth-smoothing is explained. Secondly, a view-synthesis method from up to four reference views is proposed, which adopts depth-base occlusion hole inpainting. Finally, by combining these methods together with a hierarchical bi-directional inter-view coding of multi-view image and depth maps, coding results are reported.