Stereo video coding based on quad-tree decomposition of B-P frames by motion and disparity interpolation

A new optimised technique for coding stereoscopic image sequences is presented and compared with already known methods. The proposed technique, called enhanced interpolated motion and disparity estimation (EIMDE), is based on a joint method, which encodes the frames of the right image sequence by exploiting both the temporal redundancy of the same sequence and the disparity redundancy with the left image sequence. In the proposed method, a variable block size scheme has been employed for motion and disparity estimation. The block size is controlled by quad-tree decomposition of the processed frame based on a rate-distortion splitting criterion. For the prediction of a macroblock, optimised motion and disparity vectors are jointly estimated and the participating proportion of each similarity is suitably searched. In this way, the energy of the resulted residual frame is minimised and the whole framework is optimised. Finally, the residual frame is decomposed by a discrete wavelet transform and is further compressed by morphological encoding of the resulting coefficients. The proposed coder has been experimentally evaluated on real image sequences, where it produced good performance over other known methods.