3D Visual Communications

5.2 Two-View Stereo Video Coding

In this section, we discuss the early development of 3D video coding technologies based on existing single-view video codecs. There are two basic coding methodologies: individual view coding and inter-view coding.

5.2.1 Individual View Coding

Two-view stereo video coding considers the simplest scenario which consists of two videos representing the left and right views from two slightly different viewpoints. These two viewpoints are separated by a distance similar to the distance between a human's two eyes. A straightforward approach to realizing two-view stereo video coding is to apply an existing 2D video coding scheme to each view independently with some extra design consideration at the application level. First, the synchronization for playback between the two views should be maintained to make sure that both views show the correct frames at the targeted display time. Second, if the random access and/or trick plays (such as fast/slow forward/backward) capability are needed, the IDRs or I-frames should be inserted in both views at the targeted access points. The advantage of the individual view coding is the low computation complexity needed in the viewer device side since the device just needs two instances of video decoders to decode these two bit streams and render them directly without any extra computation. Besides, the error propagation is limited inside each view since there is no prediction across different views, which provides a good ...