An epipolar resticted inter-mode selection for stereoscopic video encoding

Fast stereoscopic video encoding becomes a highly desired technique because the stereoscopic video has been realizable for applications like TV broadcasting and consumer electronics. The stereoscopic video has high inter-view dependency subject to epipolar restriction, which can be used to reduce the encoding complexity. In this paper, we propose a fast inter-prediction mode selection algorithm for stereoscopic video encoding. Different from methods using disparity estimation, candidate modes are generated by sliding a window along the macro-block line restricted by the epipolar. Then the motion information is utilized to rectify the candidate modes. A selection failure handling algorithm is also proposed to preserve coding quality. The proposed algorithm is evaluated using independent H.264/AVC encoders for left and right views and can be extended to MVC. Experimental results show that encoding times of one view are reduced by 41.4% and 24.4% for HD and VGA videos respectively with little quality loss.