LF-TSP: Traveling salesman problem for HEVC-based light-field coding

We studied a coding scheme where light field (LF) images (dense multi-view images) are regarded as a sequence of temporal video frames and encoded with video codecs such as High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC). An important issue with this scheme is how to determine the frame order of the LF images. We propose a method to find the optimum frame order through a formulation of the traveling salesman problem (TSP). Under the assumption that video codecs are more effective with temporally smooth videos, our method, named LF-TSP, defines frame-to-frame distances for each image pairs in an LF, and attempted to find the shortest route that visits all frames. Experiments showed that our method achieved an overall better rate-distortion performance than several previous methods.