Joint Rate Allocation of Stereoscopic 3D Videos in Next-Generation Broadcast Applications

3D video is foreseen to be the next natural step in the evolution of digital media. Among various representation formats available for 3D videos, stereoscopic is considered the most mature technology so far. This paper proposes a joint rate allocation scheme for next-generation broadcast applications, in which multiple stereoscopic 3D videos are encoded and transmitted simultaneously. We first propose a scalable stereoscopic video coding scheme that inherits features from scalable video coding. The scalable format makes the rate control of each video as easy as bit-stream extraction. For the two views in stereo videos, the reference view is independently coded to provide backward compatibility, while the auxiliary view is coded using the reference view as a base layer to remove inter-view redundancy. Based on the well-known fact that the human visual system can compensate and conceal the degraded fidelity in one of the two views, provided the other view is encoded at a high quality, the proposed joint rate allocation scheme does adaptive bit allocation between views to obtain high compression efficiency and better quality. Experimental results show that the proposed framework achieves smaller quality fluctuation among videos and higher perceived quality in each video as compared with the existing system.