Fast encoding techniques for Multiview Video Coding

Multiview Video Coding (MVC) is a technique that permits efficient compression of multiview video. MVC uses variable block size motion and disparity estimation for block matching. This requires an exhaustive search process that involves all possible macroblock partition sizes. We analyze the time complexity of MVC and the methods that have been proposed to speed up motion and disparity estimation. We then propose two new methods: Previous Disparity Vector Disparity Estimation (PDV-DE) and Stereo-Motion Consistency Constraint Motion and Disparity Estimation (SMCC-MDE). PDV-DE exploits the correlation between temporal levels and disparity vectors to speed up the disparity estimation process while SMCC-MDE exploits the geometrical relationship of consecutive frame pairs to speed up motion and disparity estimation. We build a complete low complexity MVC encoding solution that combines our two methods with complementary previous methods to speed up motion and disparity search. We evaluate the complexity of our solution in terms of encoding time and number of search points. Our experimental results show that our solution can reduce the encoding time and number of search points of the standard MVC implementation (JMVM 6.0) using the fast TZ search mode by up to 93.7% and 96.9%, respectively, with negligible degradation in the rate-distortion performance. Compared to the best published results, this is an improvement of up to 11% and 7%, respectively. ∗Corresponding author. Tel.: 44 116 207 8096; Fax: +44 116 207 8159 Email addresses: [email protected] (S. Khattak), [email protected] (R. Hamzaoui), [email protected] (S. Ahmad), [email protected] (P. Frossard) Preprint submitted to Signal Processing: Image Communication December 22, 2012 t0 t1 t2 t3 t4 t5 t6 t7 t8 V0