<title>MPEG-2 multiview profile and its application in 3D TV</title>

Abstract

Recent developments in the technology of digital video compression, transmission and displays have made the multiple viewpoint digital video viable for many applications, e.g. stereoscopic view for 3D TV and arbitrary angle scene compositing for virtual camera, etc. To facilitate these applications the Motion Pictures Experts Group (MPEG) of the International Standards Organization (ISO), that successfully created the MPEG-1 & 2 standards, has been working on amending the MPEG-2 standard to create a new MPEG-2 profile, called the Multi-View Profile (MVP). MVP features a two-layer -- base layer and enhancement layer -- video coding scheme. The base layer video is coded as MPEG-2 main profile (MP) bitstream. The enhancement layer video is coded with temporal scalability tools and exploits the correlation between the two viewing angles to improve the compression efficiency. This type of two layer approach guarantees backward and forward compatibility with main profile receivers and encoders; i.e. an MVP decoder will be able to decode any main profile bit stream at the same level and a main profile receiver will be able to decode the base layer of an MVP stream to generate and display mono view scenes of the same program. In stereoscopic video applications the base layer is assigned to the left eye view and the enhancement layer to the right eye view. This paper provides an overview of the MPEG-2 MVP and focuses in detail on the stereoscopic video compression algorithms.