Optimization of video coding for telepresence applications

In several telepresence applications the transmitting end is resource constrained, hence multi-view video has to be source coded and transmitted to a location where stereo matching is performed. The effect of video source coding on stereo matching techniques is presently not well understood. In this paper, we present an analysis which quantitatively demonstrates the impact of standard video coding techniques on the quality of well-known stereo matching algorithms. We propose a quantitative evaluation methodology and framework. Evaluation is also presented for the state-of-the-art Annex H of H.264/AVC (multi-view coding). The results shed a light on the tradeoff between video coding parameters and the quality of dense stereo matching. This enables us to select suitable operating regions for both stereo matching and video coding, for a diverse range of applications. In addition, various system configurations with varying performance-complexity tradeoff are also compared, giving insight on selecting the configuration suitable for a variety of telepresence applications.