Stereo video coding based on frame estimation and interpolation

Abstract

The paper proposes a stereo video coding system. To ensure compatibility with monoscopic transmission, one of the view sequences is coded and transmitted conforming to the MPEG standard, referred to as the reference stream, and the other view stream is referred to as target stream. Only a few frames of the latter are coded and transmitted, while the rest are skipped and reconstructed at the decoder using a novel stereoscopic frame compensation and interpolation technique, termed SFEI BLCF. In disparity estimation, smooth and accurate disparity fields are obtained by using hierarchical Markov random field (MRF) and Gibbs random field (GRF) models. A fast search method is used to improve the precision and computation speed. Coding and decoding results show that, with only 8/spl sim/30% additional bandwidth over a single view bit stream, one can transmit, store, and reconstruct stereoscopic video sequences with reasonably good performance.