Lossless coding of light field images based on minimum-rate predictors

Recent developments in light field acquisition and computational photography are driving new research efforts on light field encoding methods, capable of exploiting the specific features of this type of visual data. This paper presents a research study of lossless light field image compression, using Minimum-Rate Predictors (MRP) and mainstream image and video encoders. The research is focused on three light field representation formats: lenslet images, stack of sub-aperture images and epipolar images. The main contributions of this work are the 'Spiral-blackend' serialization method and the use of MRP for the lossless compression of light fields with joint encoding of RGB data. The results show that the lenslet format yields lower compression efficiencies than other formats. Furthermore, it is demonstrated that the MRP algorithm consistently outperforms HEVC-RExt, JPEG2000, JPEG-LS and CALIC when light fields are represented by either a stack of sub-aperture or epipolar images.