Asymmetric spatial scalability in stereoscopic video coding

Under many viewing circumstances, asymmetric stereoscopic video coding provides similar perceived quality with significant decrease in bitrate, computational complexity, and memory usage compared to conventional stereoscopic video coding. However, in other circumstances, users may prefer conventional symmetric stereoscopic video to asymmetric stereoscopic video. This paper presents a stereoscopic video coding scheme including asymmetric spatial scalability to provide the bitstream adaptation capability to meet heterogeneous network conditions, receiver devices, and user preferences. The spatial scalability property is enabled for the non-base view, and hence the coded bitstream can be decoded as conventional or mixed-resolution stereoscopic video. Simulation results show that the proposed method outperforms the tested other coding schemes providing the same scalability property by at least 8.2% in terms of average bitrate saving.