Frame-compatible asymmetric stereo video coding considering human perception

Stereo video offers enhanced visual experience for daily entertainment and attracts much attention in industry and academia recently. It is essential to make the delivery of 3D video efficient and friendly to the wide public. To reduce the stereo data and also reuse the existing infrastructure and equipment for 2D video, a frame-compatible stereo video format is usually used. In this format, the stereo video is packed into a single video and each view is represented by only half data to realize an efficient transmission. In this paper, an asymmetric frame-compatible stereo video coding technique considering visual perception is proposed, where both the downscaling factors and downscaling methods for the two views are distinct. The idea is to ensure better quality for image regions with higher attention in the dominant view to offer enhanced stereoscopic visual experience. The experimental results show that the proposed technique achieves better performance in providing objective and subjective image quality, compared to the popular frame-compatible stereo video coding schemes.