Distributed grayscale stereo image coding with unsupervised learning of disparity

Distributed compression is particularly attractive for stereo images since it avoids communication between cameras. Since compression performance depends on exploiting the redundancy between images, knowing the disparity is important at the decoder. Unfortunately, distributed encoders cannot calculate this disparity and communicate it. We consider the compression of grayscale stereo images, and develop an Expectation Maximization algorithm to perform unsupervised learning of disparity during the decoding procedure. Towards this, we devise a novel method for joint bitplane distributed source coding of grayscale images. Our experiments with both natural and synthetic 8-bit images show that the unsupervised disparity learning algorithm outperforms a system which does no disparity compensation by between 1 and more than 3 bits/pixel and performs nearly as well as a system which knows the disparity through an oracle.