Parallax to Align Them All: An OmniParallax Attention Mechanism for Distributed Multi-View Image Compression

Multi-view image compression (MIC) aims to achieve high compression efficiency by exploiting inter-image correlations, playing a crucial role in 3D applications. As a subfield of MIC, distributed multi-view image compression (DMIC) offers performance comparable to MIC while eliminating the need for inter-view information at the encoder side. However, existing methods in DMIC typically treat all images equally, overlooking the varying degrees of correlation between different views during decoding, which leads to suboptimal coding performance. To address this limitation, we propose a novel OmniParallax Attention Mechanism (OPAM), which is a general mechanism for explicitly modeling correlations and aligned features between arbitrary pairs of information sources. Building upon OPAM, we propose a Parallax Multi Information Fusion Module (PMIFM) to adaptively integrate information from different sources. PMIFM is incorporated into both the joint decoder and the entropy model to construct our end-to-end DMIC framework, ParaHydra. Extensive experiments demonstrate that ParaHydra is the first DMIC method to significantly surpass state-of-the-art MIC codecs, while maintaining low computational overhead. Performance gains become more pronounced as the number of input views increases. Compared with LDMIC, ParaHydra achieves bitrate savings of 19.72% on WildTrack(3) and up to 24.18% on WildTrack(6), while significantly improving coding efficiency (as much as 65× in decoding and 34× in encoding).