Sparse representation of visual data for compression and compressed sensing

Book excerpt: The ongoing advances in computational photography have introduced a range of new imaging techniques for capturing multidimensional visual data such as light fields, BRDFs, BTFs, and more. A key challenge inherent to such imaging techniques is the large amount of high dimensional visual data that is produced, often requiring GBs, or even TBs, of storage. Moreover, the utilization of these datasets in real time applications poses many difficulties due to the large memory footprint. Furthermore, the acquisition of large-scale visual data is very challenging and expensive in most cases. This thesis makes several contributions with regards to acquisition, compression, and real time rendering of high dimensional visual data in computer graphics and imaging applications. Contributions of this thesis reside on the strong foundation of sparse representations. Numerous applications are presented that utilize sparse representations for compression and compressed sensing of visual data. Specifically, we present a single sensor light field camera design, a compressive rendering method, a real time precomputed photorealistic rendering technique, light field (video) compression and real time rendering, compressive BRDF capture, and more. Another key contribution of this thesis is a general framework for compression and compressed sensing of visual data, regardless of the dimensionality. As a result, any type of discrete visual data with arbitrary dimensionality can be captured, compressed, and rendered in real time. This thesis makes two theoretical contributions. In particular, uniqueness conditions for recovering a sparse signal under an ensemble of multidimensional dictionaries is presented. The theoretical results discussed here are useful for designing efficient capturing devices for multidimensional visual data. Moreover, we derive the probability of successful recovery of a noisy sparse signal using OMP, one of the most widely used algorithms for solving compressed sensing problems.