Quality assessment of asymmetric stereo video coding

It is well known that the human visual system can perceive high frequencies in 3D, even if that information is present in only one of the views. Therefore, the best 3D stereo quality may be achieved by asymmetric coding where the reference (right) and auxiliary (left) views are coded at unequal PSNR. However, the questions of what should be the level of this asymmetry and whether asymmetry should be achieved by spatial resolution reduction or SNR (quality) reduction are open issues. Extensive subjective tests indicate that when the reference view is encoded at sufficiently high quality, the auxiliary view can be encoded above a low-quality threshold without a noticeable degradation on the perceived stereo video quality. This low-quality threshold may depend on the 3D display; e.g., it is about 31 dB for a parallax barrier display and 33 dB for a polarized projection display. Subjective tests show that, above this PSNR threshold value, users prefer SNR reduction over spatial resolution reduction on both parallax barrier and polarized projection displays. It is also observed that, if the auxiliary view is encoded below this threshold value, symmetric coding starts to perform better than asymmetric coding in terms of perceived 3D video quality.