Fast motion estimation with dual search window for stereo 3d video encoding

Stereoscopic 3D video is becoming a reality in many application areas, ranging from high quality entertainment to mobile video services. Due to the need to process two views, the complexity of 3D video applications is significantly higher than traditional 2D counterparts. In order to enable real-time 3D video services in mobile devices, this paper proposes a novel algorithm which reduces the complexity of stereo video encoding with improvement of coding efficiency. A novel search window center prediction method is proposed that exploits the correlation between two views. Experimental results show that the average encoding time of the second view can be decreased by 80% with an increase in coding efficiency of up to 2%. The state-of-art fast motion estimation methods for stereoscopic 3D video encoding show coding efficiency decrease, whereas proposed method achieves the speed-up with increase in coding efficiency, making it suitable for high quality 3D video applications.