5.3 Frame-Compatible Stereo Coding

To deploy the two-view stereo video over the existing content delivery infrastructure, which normally supports one 2D video stream, the stereo video should be processed such that it is frame- and format-compatible during the transmission phase. There are two different types of frame-compatible stereo coding according to the picture resolution and discussed separately in the following two sections.

5.3.1 Half-Resolution Frame-Compatible Stereo Coding

In order to deploy stereo video through current broadcasting infrastructure originally designed for 2D video coding and transmission, almost all current 3D broadcasting solutions are based on multiplexing the stereo video into a single coded frame via spatial subsampling, that is, the original left and right views are subsampled into half resolution and then merged into a single video frame for compression and transmission over the infrastructure widely used for 2D video programs. At the decoder side, the de-multiplexing and interpolation are conducted to reconstruct the dual views [13]. By doing so, the frame merged from left and right view is frame compatible to existing video codec.

The half-resolution frame-compatible encoder consists of three components: (a) spatial resampling, (b) resampled pixel repacking, and (c) compression of packed frames. For the spatial resampling component, there are three common methods: (a) side-by-side format, which downsamples the original full-resolution video frame ...

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