Stereo Interleaving Video Coding With Content Adaptive Image Subsampling

Stereo interleaving video coding, in which both left and right view frames are subsampled into half size and multiplexed into one single frame before being encoded by a traditional 2-D video encoder, is an efficient encoding scenario for stereoscopic video. Many existing stereo interleaving video coding methods subsample each frame by utilizing fixed subsampling filter coefficients. Such methods are easy to implement; however, the varying property of the frame signal is ignored. By jointly considering the influences of subsampling and compression, a rate and distortion analysis about stereo interleaving video coding is proposed. The final distortion in stereo interleaving video coding is the summation of errors caused by subsampling (causing distortion between subsampling-interpolated image and the original full resolution one) and by quantization during compression. Based on the provided rate distortion analysis, a content adaptive image subsampling (CAIS) is also proposed. In CAIS, the half-size frames are generated by the optimal subsampling filters, which are calculated based on frame contents and the targeted interpolation coefficients. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed CAIS is able to greatly improve compression efficiency of stereo interleaving video coding.