Asymmetrie luminance based filtering for stereoscopic video compression

Asymmetric stereo video coding is a well-known enhancement technique for efficient 3D video rate scaling, taking advantage from the binocular suppression theory. Usually in asymmetric video coding one view is encoded in a higher spatial/ temporal resolution or quality, while the auxiliary view is encoded with a lower resolution or quality. In this paper a novel asymmetric video coding approach is proposed to enhance the stereoscopic video compression efficiency. A regionally adaptive smoothing filter is applied to dark pixels of one view while the same filter is only applied to the light pixels of the other view. The location and the strength of the smoothing filters are determined according to the texture characteristics and the degree of the brightness of each individual pixel within the image. A series of systematic subjective tests were conducted, confirming that no quality degradation is perceptible by application of such filters. This is while the objective measurements show a Bjontegaard delta bitrate reduction of up to 26.6% and with an average of 16.8%.