34/45-Mbps 3D HDTV digital coding scheme using modified motion compensation with disparity vectors

This paper describes a digital compression coding scheme for transmitting three dimensional stereo HDTV signals with full resolution at bit-rates around 30 to 40 Mbps to be adapted for PDH networks of the CCITT 3rd digital hierarchy, 34 Mbps and 45 Mbps, SDH networks of 52 Mbps and ATM networks. In order to achieve a satisfactory quality for stereo HDTV pictures, three advanced key technologies are introduced into the MPEG-2 Multi-View Profile, i.e., a modified motion compensation using disparity vectors estimated between the left and right pictures, an adaptive rate control using a common buffer memory for left and right pictures encoding, and a discriminatory bit allocation which results in the improvement of left pictures quality without any degradation of right pictures. From the results of coding experiment conducted to evaluate the coding picture achieved by this coding scheme, it is confirmed that our coding scheme gives satisfactory picture quality even at 34 Mbps including audio and FEC data.