On-line statistical analysis based fast mode decision for multi-view video coding

The high computational complexity of multi-view video codecs makes it necessary to speed up for their realization in consumer electronics. Since fast encoding algorithms are expected to adapt to different video sequences, this paper proposes a fast algorithm that consists of fast mode decision and fast disparity estimation for multi-view video coding. The fast mode decision algorithm applies to both temporal and inter-view predictions. The candidates for mode decision are reduced based on a set of thresholds. Differ from the previous fast mode decision algorithms for MVC, this scheme determines the thresholds according to the online statistical analysis of motion and disparity costs of the first GOP in each view. Since the inter-view prediction is time consuming, we propose a fast disparity estimation algorithm to save encoding time. Experimental results show that our proposed scheme reduces the computational complexity significantly with negligible degradation of coding efficiency.