Super-rays grouping scheme and novel coding architecture for computational time reduction of graph-based Light Field coding

Abstract: Graph-based Light Field coding using the concept of super-rays is powerful to exploit signal redundancy along irregular shapes and achieves good energy compaction, compared to rectangular block -based approaches. However, its main limitation lies in the high time complexity for eigen-decomposition of each super-ray local graph, a high number of which can be found in a Light Field when segmented into super-rays. This paper examines a grouping scheme for super-rays in order to reduce the number of eigen-decomposition times, and proposes a novel coding architecture to handle the signal residual data arising for each super-ray group, as a tradeoff to achieve lower computational time. Experimental results have shown to reduce a considerable amount of decoding time for Light Field scenes, despite having a slight increase in the coding bitrates when compared with the original non-grouping super-ray -based approach. The proposal also remains to have competitive performance in Rate Distortion in comparison to HEVC-based and JPEG Pleno -based methods.