Unequal inter-view rate allocation using scalable stereo video coding and an objective stereo video quality measure

In stereoscopic 3D video, it is well-known that humans can perceive high quality 3D video provided that one of the views is in high quality. Hence, in stereo video encoding, the best overall rate vs. perceived-distortion performance may be achieved by reduction of the spatial, temporal, and/or quantization resolution of the second view, while keeping the first view in full resolution. In this paper, we address the best selection of unequal inter-view rate allocation strategy depending on the content of the video for a scalable multi-view video codec (SMVC) (Ozbek et al., 2006). Since the perceived 3D video quality does not correlate well with the average PSNR of the two views, we propose a new quantitative measure using a weighted combination of two PSNR values and a jerkiness measure. We verified that unequal rate allocation between the left and right views results in better perceived stereo video quality.