STEREOSCOPIC VIDEO ENCODING AND DECODING METHODS AND APPARATUS

摘要

Methods and apparatus for stereoscopic image encoding and decoding are described. Left and right eye images are encoded following an entropy reduction operation being applied to one of the eye images when there is a difference between the left and right images of an image pair. Information about regions of negative parallax within the entropy reduced image of an image pair is encoded along with the images. Upon decoding a sharpening filter is applied to the image in an image pair which was subjected to the entropy reduction operation. In addition edge enhancement filtering is performed on the regions of the recovered entropy reduced image which are identified in the encoded image data as regions of negative parallax. Interleaving of left and right eye images at the input of the encoder combined with entropy reduction allows for efficient encoding, storage, and transmission of 3D images.

主权项

1. A method of operating an encoder apparatus to encode stereoscopic image data representing pairs of first and second eye images, each first eye image in an image pair corresponding to one of a left eye image and a right eye image, the second eye image of each image pair corresponding to the other one of the left and right eye images, the method comprising:
determining an amount of difference between a first eye image and a second eye image of a first image pair; when it is determined that there is a non-zero amount of difference between the first eye image and the second eye image of said first image pair, performing the steps of:
i) performing an entropy reduction operation on second eye image data representing the second eye image of the first image pair to produce entropy reduced second eye image data;ii) encoding first eye image data representing the first one of the eye images of said first image pair to generate compressed first eye image data; andiii) encoding said entropy reduced second eye image data to generate compressed second eye image data; and storing or transmitting the compressed first eye image data and compressed second eye image data.