Early disparity estimation skipping for multi-view video coding

Multi-view video (MVV) and multi-view plus depth video became typical formats for 3D video systems which offer more realistic visual effects for consumers. The standard for encoding of MVV, known as multi-view video coding (MVC), was produced by ISO/IEC and ITU-T and has exhibited significant compression efficiency for MVV signals. However, the high computational complexity of MVC leads to excessive power consumption and limits its applications. In this study, new fast algorithms for MVC are proposed by skipping disparity estimation prediction. According to the characteristics of the motion and disparity vectors, unnecessary disparity estimation is skipped based on the amount of motion that can be measured through the use of motion activity and SKIP mode on the temporal axis. Experimental results showed that by skipping the disparity estimation, the proposed method reduced the encoding computational complexity by nearly 73% for inter-view prediction and 38% in the overall encoding process of B-views. In addition, no noticeable visual quality degradation was observed.