Rate-distortion constrained quadtree segmentation for stereoscopic video coding

In this paper, a rate-distortion framework is proposed to define a jointly optimal displacement vector field estimation (DVFE) and quadtree segmentation technique for stereo video coding. This technique achieves maximum reconstructed image quality under the constraint of a target bit rate for the coding of the displacement vector field, quadtree segmentation information, and the residual signal. A fast hierarchical motion/disparity estimation scheme as well as a conditional optimization strategy is proposed to drastically reduce the large computation cost required in the R-D optimization process. The simulation results show that the proposed method can achieve more than 1 dB PSNR quality improvement over the H.263 TMN5 video codec at an acceptable extra computation cost.