Coding of 3D Videos Based on Visual Discomfort
This work addresses video compression for 3D content, but it is incremental as it builds on existing rate-distortion optimization methods.
The authors tackled the problem of optimizing 3D video coding by estimating visual discomfort using temporal and spatial outliers in depth maps, resulting in improved bit-rates and fidelity metrics like SSIM and PSNR compared to default H.264/AVC algorithms.
We propose a rate-distortion optimization method for 3D videos based on visual discomfort estimation. We calculate visual discomfort in the encoded depth maps using two indexes: temporal outliers (TO) and spatial outliers (SO). These two indexes are used to measure the difference between the processed depth map and the ground truth depth map. These indexes implicitly depend on the amount of edge information within a frame and on the amount of motion between frames. Moreover, we fuse these indexes considering the temporal and spatial complexities of the content. We test the proposed method on a number of videos and compare the results with the default rate-distortion algorithms in the H.264/AVC codec. We evaluate rate-distortion algorithms by comparing achieved bit-rates, visual degradations in the depth sequences and the fidelity of the depth videos measured by SSIM and PSNR.