MPEG-4 based stereoscopic and multiview video coding

The paper proposes a stereoscopic and multiview video sequences encoder compatible with MPEG-4. The main view of the sequences is encoded as an MPEG-4 bitstream and the auxiliary views are encoded by joint motion and disparity compensation, so that both temporal and spatial redundancy are reduced and high compression is achieved. The disparity and motion fields for both main and auxiliary views are calculated using a joint disparity-motion estimation and regularization algorithm. We test the proposed encoder for coding stereoscopic (2-view) and 3-view video sequences and compare it with the MPEG multi-view profile (MVP) implemented on the MPEG-4 platform. The proposed system achieves higher image quality at the same bitrate than existing multiview video encoders and is suitable for various applications, such as video-conferencing and 3D telepresence systems.