Integrating stereoscopic image transcoding with retargeting for mobile streaming

With the progresses in 3D imaging technologies, mobile stereoscopic images are gradually popular since it can provide the anytime and anywhere 3D viewing effects. Due to the heterogeneous transmission environments and various screen sizes of mobile devices, the stereoscopic image transcoding and retargeting are two completely independent adaptation techniques for mobile 3D image streaming. These two processing operations both deal with the disparity estimation. In this work, we propose to integrate stereoscopic 3D image transcoding with retargeting for mobile streaming. The stereoscopic image transcoding and retargeting are coupled through a straightforward link that provides the pixel-based disparity map from the retargeting stage to guide the transcoding for saving some computations while keeping efficient bit allocation. Our experimental results clearly demonstrate the advantage of coupling the transcoding with retargeting in terms of faster transcoding and saliency-based bit allocation for low bit-rate mobile streaming.