Multi-view video coding with view interpolation prediction for 2D camera arrays

An efficient compression algorithm for multi-view video sequences, which are captured by two-dimensional (2D) camera arrays, is proposed in this work. First, we propose a novel prediction structure, called three-dimensional hierarchical B prediction (3DHBP), which can efficiently reduce horizontal inter-view redundancies, vertical inter-view redundancies, and temporal redundancies in multi-view videos. Second, we develop a view interpolation scheme based on the bilateral disparity estimation. The interpolation scheme yields high quality view frames by adapting disparity estimation and compensation procedures using the information in neighboring frames. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed multi-view video coding algorithm provides significantly better rate–distortion (R–D) performance than the conventional algorithm, by employing the 3DHBP structure and using interpolated view frames as additional reference frames. 2009 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.