An extended AMVP scheme in HEVC with MPEG-2 for a hybrid stereoscopic encoder

A hybrid stereoscopic broadcasting service is considered a possible solution to the lack of frequency bandwidth for transmission of additional view sequences and to the backward compatibility for the existing MPEG-2 based DTV services. In this paper, a hybrid stereoscopic encoder based on MPEG-2 and HEVC is first considered where left-view sequences are encoded by MPEG-2 to provide the backward compatibility while right-view sequences are encoded by HEVC for delivery over Internet. In the hybrid stereoscopic encoder, we propose an inter-view coding scheme between the left- and right-view sequences to enhance the coding performance of HEVC for right-view sequences. Therefore, in this paper, an extension to HEVC is made with an inter-view coding scheme by having disparity based motion-compensated prediction. For this, MPEG-2 motion vectors from left-view sequences and global disparity vectors between two-view sequences are utilized. The experimental results show that the proposed hybrid stereoscopic encoder achieves average 37.75% coding gain in BDBR compared with the performance of HEVC simulcast encoding for right-view sequences.

I. Introduction

WITH remarkable progress of broadcasting technologies and the rise in interest for the realistic media in recent years, territorial 3DTV broadcasting services are expected to be popularized in near future. The experimental broadcasting for HD-quality 3DTV services has recently been started over existing terrestrial DTV broadcasting systems in Korea [1]–[2]. For 3DTV services over the legacy DTV broadcasting systems, there exists two problems: bandwidth allocation and backward compatibility with the existing 2DTV. Therefore, the constraint of the backward compatibility hinders 3DTV services to adopt more advanced video coding standards such as H.264/AVC.