A H.264 compliant stereoscopic video CODEC

Due to the provision of a more natural representation of a scene in the form of left and right eye views, a stereoscopic imaging system provides a more effective method for image/video display. Unfortunately the vast amount of information that needs to be transmitted/stored to represent a stereo image pair / video sequence, has so far hindered its use in commercial applications. However, by properly exploiting the spatial, temporal and binocular redundancy, a stereo image pair or a sequence could be compressed and transmitted through a single monocular channel's bandwidth without unduly sacrificing the perceived stereoscopic image quality. In this paper, we present a new technique for coding stereo video sequences based on H.264 [1] video codec. The proposed codec exploits disparity and worldline correlation in addition to the advance compression techniques inherited by the H.264 standard to achieve a higher video quality especially in the low bit rates. We compare the performance of the proposed CODEC with a DCT-based, modified MPEG-2 stereo video CODEC [2] and ZTE based stereo video CODEC [3]. We show that the proposed CODEC outperforms the benchmark CODECs in coding both main and auxiliary streams by up to 9.0 dB PSNR gain. © 2005 IEEE