A new stereo packing format based on checkerboard sub-sampling for efficient stereo video coding

Since the 3D coding and transmission standard is not available nowadays, we need to transfer the 3D contents through the existing coding standards. To achieve this, the most common way is to combine both left and right eye frames into one single frame, which is the so-called stereo packing. So far, there are many packing methods and each of them has different characteristics and advantages. To obtain the better coding efficiency and reconstructed quality, we propose an adaptive checkerboard-based stereo coding system to retain the advantages of most different packing methods. The proposed system first computes the features of the stereo image pairs then finds the most suitable packing mode for efficient transmission. In the decoder side, the proposed de-packing mechanism is first adopted to find the correct packing mode. Afterward, an edge-dependent interpolation method is performed to attain better reconstructed quality. Experimental results reveal that the proposed method can achieve better results when comparing with other existing methods.