Stereo video encoder optimization for mobile applications

This paper presents a stereo video encoder optimization for mobile applications. While video coding applications mostly concentrate on finding a good trade-off between rate and distortion, the additional constraint of limited processing power has to be considered for mobile applications. Realizing mobile video coding applications for stereo instead of 2D video is challenging, as twice the amount of video data has to be processed. Therefore, we investigate how the trade-off between rate, distortion, and complexity can be optimized for the multiview video coding (MVC) extension of the H.264/AVC standard. In the paper, we focus on the encoder, as its complexity is much higher and more configuration dependent than at the decoder. By enabling and disabling certain tools and setting different parameter values, the encoder complexity can be adapted for mobile applications. The presented results show that an optimized MVC encoder configuration performs significantly faster without impairing the rate-distortion performance.