Rate controlling for color and depth based 3D video coding

Abstract

Rate control is a very important tool for any kind of video coding and transmission. Even though there are many rate control techniques designed for 2D video, not much work has been carried out in this area for 3D video. In this paper, a novel rate control approach for 3D video based on color and depth maps is introduced. The aim of this rate control algorithm is to keep the 3D video quality near constant. Since the 3D video is synthesized from color and depth maps and the final quality of 3D video is more influenced by color sequence rather than depth maps, the qualities of both color and depth maps are firstly varied until the target 3D quality is achieved with minimal bit rate. Subsequently, the PSNR of both color and depth maps at the optimum point are maintained for the entire group of picture (GOP). The bit-allocation problem is solved by introducing a Lagrangian optimization cost function. According to experimental results, the proposed rate control technique is capable to adjust the bit rate allocated to the color and depth maps sequences adaptively in order to maximize 3D video quality which is measured by PSNR of the synthesized left and right views using reconstructed color and depth map sequences

A Novel View-Level Target Bit Rate Distribution Estimation Technique for Real-Time Multi-view Video Plus Depth

“…The main drawback of this algorithm lies in the fact that it is not based on the new H264/MVC standard and is not suitable for real-time applications. The authors of [19] propose a similar approach using Lagrangian optimisation techniques.…”

A Novel Rate Control Technique for Multiview Video Plus Depth Based 3D Video Coding

“…In (18) and (19), , where is the number of total reference views in the current view coding. Thus, the final target bits are (20) where and are defined as (21) and (22) IV. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS In order to evaluate the proposed 3D video rate control algorithm, several experiments are performed with 3D video sequences of Breakdancers, Book Arrival, Alt Moabit, Mobile and Kendo.…”

“…Lim et al first proposed a 3D multiview rate control algorithm based on human visual system [19]. For video plus depth representation, the off-line rate control methods using evolution strategy [20] or Lagrangian optimization [21] are proposed. However, these 3D video rate control algorithms are not used for MVD-based 3D video coding, and they also do not aim at 3D video coding with the new H.264/MVC standard.…”