MPEG-2 stereoscopic video coding technique using adaptive bandwidth control

According to recent advances in three-dimensional display systems, interest in stereoscopic video coding and reconstruction has been increased in various fields of video processing. Efficient video coding techniques are required to reduce the amount of data. In this paper, we propose an effective algorithm that improves the quality of moving picture experts group-2 stereoscopic sequences, in which optimal quantization parameters (QPs) are selected for pairs of corresponding macroblocks in left and right frames taken at the same time instants but from different view angles. The proposed algorithm reduces the binocular redundancy between the left and right frames. To minimize the total distortion, it adaptively determines QPs and the bandwidth for encoding of pairs of the frame sequence. The proposed algorithm is compared with the conventional video encoding methods in terms of the video quality and the use of bandwidth. Especially for video sequences containing a number of moving blocks and scene changes, the proposed algorithm shows better performance than the conventional methods in terms of the performance of disparity estimation and adaptive bandwidth control.