Single encoder and decoder design for multi-view video

The progress of data transmission technology through the Internet has spread a variety of realistic contents. One of such contents is multi-view video that is acquired from multiple camera sensors. In general, the multi-view video processing requires encoders and decoders as many as the number of cameras, and thus the processing complexity results in difficulties of practical implementation. To solve for this problem, this paper considers a simple multi-view system utilizing a single encoder and a single decoder. In the encoder side, input multi-view YUV sequences are combined on GOP units by a video mixer. Then, the mixed sequence is compressed by an H.264/AVC encoder. The decoding is composed of a single decoder and a scheduler controlling the decoding process. The goal of the scheduler is to assign approximately identical number of decoded frames to each view sequence by estimating the decoder utilization of a GOP and subsequently applying frame skip algorithms. Furthermore, in the frame skip, efficient frame selection algorithms are studied for H.264/AVC baseline and main profiles based upon a cost function that is related to perceived video quality. Our proposed method has been performed on various multi-view test sequences adopted by MPEG 3DAV. Experimental results show that approximately identical decoder utilization is achieved for each view sequence so that each view sequence is fairly displayed. Finally, the performance of the proposed method is compared with a simulcast encoder in terms of bit-rate and PSNR using a rate-distortion curve.