Extension of the MPEG Video Compression Standard to Accommodate Stereo Video Streams

Abstract

The MPEG 1 video compression standard offers an interesting opportunity for extension to accommodate stereo image-pair movies. By taking advantage of various features in the format of the ISO 11172 stream specified by the standard, stereo MPEG movies might be created in a variety of ways. Synchronization of two movies, multiple video streams within the movie stream, and the insertion of compression-dependant frames within the video stream might all offer benefits. Most notable among these options, a secondary dependent stream of images might be implemented with only minimal cost in bandwidth by drawing on scene similarity much in the same way as existing inter-frame compression methods in MPEG 1 do. The feasibility of this method depends upon the statistical validity of stereo picture-matching, the extensibility of existing MPEG systems, and the future demand for "pre-packaged" or pre-rendered stereo movies.