An MPEG-4-compatible stereoscopic/multiview video coding scheme

In this paper, we propose an efficient codec for multiview video coding, which is compatible with the MPEG-4 video standard. The main views of the multiview video are encoded using an MPEG-4 encoder and the auxiliary views are encoded by joint disparity and motion compensation. An edge-preserving regularization scheme that jointly calculates disparity and motion vectors is performed on the VOP basis. The output of the encoder contains one bitstream for each view, and the main view bitstreams can be decoded by a standard MPEG-4 decoder. In addition, in the case of five-view encoding, we compare four different prediction structures in order to find the best one under certain scenarios. To evaluate the proposed encoder, the MPEG-2 multiview profile (MVP) is implemented on the MPEG-4 platform for fair comparison, which is referred to as MPEG-4 MVP in this paper. Experimental results prove that the proposed encoder achieves a higher image quality at similar bit rate than the conventional scheme and is very promising for the applications including videoconferencing and three-dimensional telepresence.