Regionally adaptive filtering for asymmetric stereoscopic video coding

In asymmetric stereoscopic video coding, one view can be coded in a lower resolution of the other. In this scenario, stereoscopic video can be compressed with only moderately increased bandwidth and complexity compared to 2D monoview video coding. The subjective quality degradation of this scenario can be negligible compared to coding two views with original resolution. The low-resolution view can be predicted from the high-resolution view to achieve higher coding efficiency. In this paper, a regionally adaptive filtering algorithm is proposed to generate a predictor of a macroblock (MB) or MB partition of the low-resolution view from the high-resolution view. Different filters are applied for different picture regions. Disparity motion matching and clustering are applied in the encoder for generation of regionally adaptive filters. Simulation results show that the proposed algorithm results in up to 27% bit-rate saving compared with methods without adaptive filtering.