A parallel encoding approach to H.264 stereo video

In this paper we propose an efficient H.264 based parallel encoder design for stereoscopic video coding, aimed at optimizing encoding time efficiency. Further specific design considerations of the encoder ensure independent rate control of the left/right video sequences, flexibility of left/right bit-stream switching, mono/stereo scalability of the encoded bit stream and adaptive complexity control of the encoder. We provide experimental results to demonstrate the significantly improved R-D performance of the proposed encoder, when compared with that of the existing state of the art stereoscopic encoders designed based on MPEG-2 and MPEG-4 standards. We show that the functional flexibility of the proposed encoder enables its use in many new application domains.