Iterative search strategy with selective bi-directional prediction for low complexity multiview video coding

The multiview video coding (MVC) extension of H.264/AVC is the emerging standard for compression of impressive 3D and free-viewpoint video. The coding structure in MVC adopts motion and disparity estimation to exploit temporal and inter-view dependencies in MVC. It results in a considerable increase in encoding complexity. Most of the computational burden comes from uni-directional and bi-directional prediction. In this paper, an iterative search strategy is designed to speed up the uni-directional prediction in MVC. It can work with an adaptive search range adjustment through a confidence measure of a loop constraint to obtain both motion and disparity vectors jointly. Furthermore, a selective bi-directional prediction algorithm is proposed to enhance the coding performance by analyzing the statistical characteristics of bi-directional prediction in MVC. Experimental results demonstrate that, by using the proposed fast search, the temporal and inter-view redundancies of multiview video can be eliminated sufficiently with low complexity. (C) 2012 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.