Multi-view Video Compression for 3D Displays

Multi-view 3D displays are preferable to other stereoscopic display technologies because they provide autostereoscopic viewing from any viewpoint without special glasses. However, they require a large number of pixels to achieve high image quality. Therefore, data compression is a major issue for this approach. In this paper, we describe a framework for efficient compression of multi-view video streams for multi-view 3D displays. We enhance conventional multi-view compression pipelines with an additional pre-filtering step that band limits the multi-view signal to the display bandwidth. We show that this pre-filtering step leads to increased image quality compared to state-of-the-art multi-view coding at equal bitrate. We present results of an extensive user study that corroborate the benefits of our approach. Our work suggests that any multi-view compression scheme will benefit from our pre-filtering technique.