Video retargeting based frame-compatible stereo video coding

Due to more and more request of visual entertainment with improved perceptual realism, stereo video offering enhanced realism and interactivity is highly desired. Usually, the stereo video is packed into a single video and each view preserves only half resolution to achieve an efficient delivery. In this paper, a novel frame-compatible stereo video coding technique based on content-aware video retargeting is presented. Despite of combing the stereo video into a single channel by uniform downsampling, we propose to sub-sample the stereo video in an unequal way, by taking the saliency map of the video into considering. During the reconstruction of the stereo video with original resolution, the regions with higher saliency attention are less distorted, relying on a smaller downsampling factor, instead of 2. The experimental results reveal that the proposed technique achieves up to 43% bitrate saving as compared to the most popular frame-compatible stereo formats.