Novel United Buffer Rate Control Methods for Stereoscopic Video

To investigate the impact of buffer on stereoscopic video coding, three rate control (RC) methods were presented. In the separate buffer RC method (SBRC), left and right views achieved rate controlling using respective buffer in their own given target bitrates. The united buffer RC (UBRC) and its improved united buffer RC (I-UBRC) methods were both in a given total bandwidth and the united buffer, they were performed on three levels, namely stereoscopic group of pictures (SGOP) level, stereoscopic frame (SFrame) level and frame level. The united buffer RC method adopted asymmetric-quality bits allocation based on the mean absolute difference (MAD) of left and right images in frame level. The improved united buffer RC method took relative complexity and importance into account to allocate bits rationally in SFrame level. Experimental results show that the proposed three methods can accurately control the rate to satisfy the requirements of stereoscopic video coding, and the coding efficiency of the improved united buffer RC method is the highest.