Disparity estimation using edge model for stereo video compression

Stereo video becomes an important issue with the developments of 3D display technologies. While a stereo system provides the perception of 3D depth, the amount of data for stereo video may be doubled compared to mono video. So an efficient stereo video coding technique is essential. Since the stereo video is taken from the same object in the two different views, most of objects in a stereo pair are translated only to the horizontal direction, while objects in subsequent frames of a mono video can be translated to an arbitrary direction, rotated, and zoomed. Hence, unlike in the mono video, the disparity in a stereo pair can be well estimated by a translational motion or disparity if the object boundary is exactly described. In this paper, we propose an efficient disparity estimation scheme based on a edge model describing object boundary in a block, and apply the estimated disparity to stereo video compression. In addition, a disparity regularization scheme, which is proper for the edge model, is proposed to reduce the bits required for coding the block motion vectors and disparity values. It has been found that the proposed algorithms significantly improve the coding efficiency of stereo video sequences.