A Novel Rate Control Technique for Multiview Video Plus Depth Based 3D Video Coding

This paper presents a novel rate control technique for multiview video plus depth (MVD) based 3D video coding. In the proposed rate control technique, an image-stitching method is first utilized to simultaneously encode video and depth, and then a joint rate control algorithm for MVD is presented. The joint rate control algorithm is performed on three levels, namely view level, video/depth level and frame level. In the view level, different proportions of rates are allocated for different types of views according to the pre-statistical rate allocation. In the video/depth level, the target rates for video and depth are discriminatorily assigned to guarantee the high quality of video for the backward-compatible display. In the frame level, the hierarchical rate allocation is used to regulate the target bits for each frame. In addition to the above mentioned rate control strategies, according to the special characteristics of multiview hypothetical reference decoder (HRD), the buffer-related rate control is also considered to prevent the decoder buffer from overflow or underflow even outputting multiple views. Experimental results show that the proposed rate control technique can accurately control the bit-rate to satisfy the requirements of 3D video systems.