Deep Stereo Image Compression via Bi-Directional Coding

Existing learning-based stereo compression methods usually adopt a unidirectional approach to encoding one image independently and the other image conditioned upon the first. This paper proposes a novel bi-directional coding-based end-to-end stereo image compression network (BCSIC-Net). BCSIC-Net consists of a novel bi-directional contextual transform module which performs nonlinear transform conditioned upon the inter-view context in a latent space to reduce inter-view redundancy, and a bi-directional conditional entropy model that employs inter-view correspondence as a conditional prior to improve coding efficiency. Experimental results on the InStereo2K and KITTI datasets demonstrate that the proposed BCSIC-Net can effectively reduce the inter-view redundancy and outperforms state-of-the-art methods.