A novel rate control technique for asymmetric-quality stereoscopic video

Three-dimensional (3D) video technology is becoming increasingly popular, as it can provide stereoscopic perception and immersive experience to end users. Some asymmetric stereoscopic video coding methods had been developed by utilizing binocular psycho-visual redundancy. However, rate control problem had not been well considered in these methods to further control the quality of stereoscopic video. In this paper, a novel rate control method is proposed for asymmetric-quality stereoscopic video. In order to model the asymmetric-quality stereoscopic video, we use a fixed threshold to quantize the binocular psycho-visual redundancy and establish the relationship between the distortion and quantization for the asymmetric-quality stereoscopic video. Then, a rate control method is engineered in stereoscopic video coding to control the rate and quality of left and right views. Experimental results show that the proposed method can accurately control the rate and quality of stereoscopic video, while having a lower computational complexity¹.