A Multi-pass VBR Rate Control Method for Video Plus Depth Based Mobile 3D Video Coding.

Video plus depth based 3D video gradually goes mobile. Taking into account the time-varying characteristics of wireless communication, this paper proposes a multi-pass varying bit-rate (VBR) control method for mobile 3D video coding. With the collected rate-distortion (RD) information and the reconstructed compressed video and depth in the first and second pass offline encodings, the encoder can establish the virtual view quality model (VVQM) to assess the right virtual view qualities under different rate combinations of video and depth. In the third pass encoding, the encoder utilizes VVQM to find the optimal video/depth target rate allocation, and then independently controls the video and depth rates with the rate-quantization (RQ) model. In the course of rate control, the video/depth rate allocation will be adjusted in real time to meet the varying channel bandwidth constraint. Experimental results show that the proposed rate control method can not only satisfy the VBR transmission requirements of mobile 3D video, but also provide the higher virtual view quality than the rate control method with fixed video/depth ratio rate allocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]