View order alternation symmetrization and temporal inter-view combined prediction for 3D video coding

Asymmetric stereoscopic video coding, where one view has a higher quality than the other, has been researched widely. In order to balance the quality difference between views, it has been suggested to alternate the higher-quality view periodically. However, it has also been found out that inter-view prediction is more effective when the source of prediction is the higher-quality view. In this paper, it is proposed to change the inter-view prediction direction periodically together with gradual view refresh. The proposal was implemented on top of the reference software for the multiview and multiview-plus-depth extensions of the High Efficiency Video Coding (H.265/HEVC) standard. Experimental results show that up to 9.1% and an average of 3.1% bitrate reduction are achieved with respect to the MPEG Anchor.