Low complexity independent multi-view video coding

In 3D multi-view video coding (MVC), disparity estimation (DE) are used to exploit the correlation among different view sequences. The DE process greatly increases the computational complexity of the MVC. In this paper, a novel independent low complexity multi-view video coder (I-MVC) is introduced. In the proposed MVC, the coding complexity is shifted from the encoder side to the decoder side. Instead of disparity estimation, the proposed I-MVC deploys independent component analysis (ICA) on the video streams to remove the correlation between the view sequences. The correlated (dependent) video sequences are decomposed into uncorrelated (independent) sequences and a mixing matrix. Each independent sequence is independently encoded by the H.264/AVC video coder. Then the mixing matrix is used at decoder to jointly decode the received independent sequences. Our experimental results show that the proposed I-MVC has better coding efficiency than conventional 3D multi-view video coder. The I-MVC gives more than 21% savings in overall bit rate and reduces the MVC computational complexity by 49% with less than 0.2 dB loss in the video peak signal to noise ratio.