Perceptually-adaptive quantization for stereoscopic video coding

Abstract

In this paper, we present a novel perceptually-based optimization for the improvement of stereoscopic video coding efficiency. The main idea of this proposed scheme is to adaptively adjust the quantization parameter by taking into account the Human Visual System perceptual characteristics. For this, a saliency map is generated from both views and then segmented into salient and non-salient regions. To make the proposed scheme effective, and inspired from the binocular suppression theory, the asymmetry is ensured by altering the saliency map and not the view. As a result, the proposed perceptual coding scheme effectively reduces the bit-budget without affecting the perceptual quality based on an optimization approach with asymmetric video coding taking into account the saliency map of each view. Experimental results on HEVC-MV show that the proposed algorithm can achieve over 20% bit-rate saving while preserving the perceived image quality.