An efficient polarization restraint based fast motion estimation algorithm for H.264 stereoscopic video coding is proposed in this paper. For parallel binocular-camera systems, there exists a certain principle called polarization restraint, according to which, for the object in a 3D scene, there is no vertical disparity between its projection point on the left plane and that on the right plane. The Motion Estimation (ME) complexity in the right view channel can be greatly reduced by adopting the algorithm presented in this paper. Experimental results show that, compared with the Full Search Block Match Algorithm (FSBMA), the number of search candidates of the proposed algorithm are only 1/136 of that of the FSBMA with similar decoded video quality. Besides, the computation complexity of the proposed algorithm is lower than that of Diamond Search (DS) and of Three Step Search (TSS) with much better decoded pictures' quality.
['Mingjing Ai', 'Lili Zhao', 'Yongmei Zhu', 'Qinping Zhao']
A Polarization Restraint Based Fast Motion Estimation Approach to H.264 Stereoscopic Video Coding