It is well known that the conventional ways to capture the
light around us are limited and thus provide a limited user
experience, notably in terms of parallax capabilities. As this
has been preventing 3D systems to explode in the market,
significant advances are emerging in terms of light capturing
technologies among which is relevant to highlight the socalled
light field cameras which capture a richer
representation of the visual scene by measuring the light
intensity for each direction and for each pixel position.
Considering the huge amount of light intensity data involved,
efficient compression becomes a must. In this context, this
paper addresses the light field coding challenge by using
available image coding standard solutions. With this target in
mind, this paper proposes first a compression performance
assessment methodology and presents after the compression
performance of the direct, fully compatible usage of the main
image coding standards available, notably JPEG, JPEG 2000,
H.264/AVC Intra and HEVC Intra for a representative set of
light field images. While the expected conclusion is that
HEVC Intra is the most efficient codec, other less expected
conclusions emerge.