In image based rendering (IBR), a 3D scene is recorded through a set of photos, and a novel view is rendered by assembling data from the photo set. Compression is essential to reduce the huge data amount of IBR. In this paper, we examine three categories of IBR compression algorithms: the block coder, the reference coder and the high dimensional transform (wavelet) coder. It is observed that the block coder consumes the least computation resource, however, its compression ratio is low. The reference coder achieves good compression ratio with reasonable computation complexity. The high dimensional wavelet coder achieves the best compression ratio, however, it is also the most complex.