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 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 and ZTE based stereo video CODEC. 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