Subjective study on compressed asymmetric stereoscopic video

Asymmetric stereoscopic video coding takes advantage of the binocular suppression of the human vision by representing one of the views with a lower quality. This paper describes a subjective quality test with asymmetric stereoscopic video. Different options for achieving compressed mixed-quality and mixed-resolution asymmetric stereo video were studied and compared to symmetric stereo video. The bitstreams for different coding arrangements were simulcast-coded according to the Advanced Video Coding (H.264/AVC) standard. The results showed that in most cases, resolution-asymmetric stereo video with the downsampling ratio of 1/2 along both coordinate axes provided similar quality as symmetric and quality-asymmetric full-resolution stereo video. These results were achieved under same bitrate constrain while the processing complexity decreased considerably. Moreover, in all test cases, the symmetric and mixed-quality full-resolution stereoscopic video bitstreams resulted in a similar quality at the same bitrates.