Scalable stereo video coding for heterogeneous environments

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a new stereo video coding scheme for heterogeneous consumer devices by exploiting the concept of spatio-temporal scalability. We use MPEG standard for coding the main sequence and interpolative prediction scheme for predicting the P- and B-type pictures of the auxiliary sequence. The interpolative scheme predicts matching blocks by interpolating both motion predicted macro-block and disparity predicted macro-block and employs weighting factors to minimize the residual errors. To provide flexible stereo video service, we define both a temporally scalable layer and a spatially scalable layer for each eye's view. The experimental results show the efficiency of proposed scheme by comparison with already known methods and advantages of disparity estimation in the view of scalability overhead. According to the experimental results, we expect the proposed functionalities will play a key role in establishing highly flexible stereo video service for ubiquitous display environment where device and network connections are heterogeneous.