Hybrid Codec-Based Intra-Frame Joint Rate Control for Stereoscopic Video

An intra-frame joint rate control scheme is first proposed for a hybrid coder to encode stereoscopic video, which is based on an optimization framework with a gradient-based quadratic rate-quantization model and a gradient-based linear distortion-quantization model. The proposed rate control scheme jointly works on the left and right encoders for stereoscopic video input by controlling the output bit rates of both encoders in the sense that the sum of the two decoded video qualities is maximized and the quality difference is maintained around a desired level for a given target bit budget at the same time. In experiments, the proposed intra-frame joint rate control scheme for the hybrid coder produces the average 0.62 dB gain in PSNR, 64.93% reduction in the mean PSNR differences and 72.04% reduction in the MSE of PSNR difference, compared with the independent rate control schemes of the MPEG-2 TM5 and H. 264 JM 16.