A multi-view video codec based on H.264

H.264 is the current state-of-the-art monoscopic video codec providing almost twice the coding efficiency with the same quality comparing the previous codecs. With the increasing interest in 3D TV, multi-view video sequences that are provided by multiple cameras capturing the three dimensional objects and/or scene are more widely used. Compressing multi-view sequences independently with H.264 (simulcast) is not efficient since the redundancy between the closer cameras is not exploited. In order to reduce these redundancies, we propose a Multi-View Video Codec based on H.264 using disparity estimation/compensation as well as motion estimation/compensation. In order to effectively search for disparity/motion without increasing computational complexity, we modified the buffering structure of H.264 and implemented several referencing modes. Our results show that for closely located cameras, our codec outperforms simulcast H.264 coding. For sparsely located cameras, our method can still improve coding gain depending on the video characteristics.