Perceptual Asymmetric Video Coding for 3D-HEVC

Abstract

In the scope of stereoscopic 3D video, asymmetric video coding is an effective method in terms of maintaining the perceived quality while reducing the required transmission bandwidth by exploiting the perceptual phenomenon of binocular suppression. On the other hand, just noticeable distortion (JND) has been applied successfully in improving the video coding efficiency by removing human visual redundancies. However perceptual asymmetric coding combined with JND has not been studied. In this paper, the effectiveness of using JND aided asymmetric 3D video coding is explored for 3D-HEVC. We conducted extensive subjective tests, which indicate that if the base view is encoded at perceptual high quality and the dependent view is encoded at a lower perceptual quality, then the degradation in 3D video quality is unnoticeable and asymmetric just-noticeable distortion threshold is gained. Furthermore, we proposed a novel perceptually asymmetric 3D video coding framework by taking full advantage of these observations and subjective test results. Experimental results demonstrate that, compared with HTM, the proposed asymmetric 3D-HEVC video coding demonstrates comparable 3D perceived visual quality with about 13% bitrates savings in the whole view and about 32% bitrates savings for dependent view.