View Synthesis Distortion Estimation for AVC- and HEVC-Compatible 3-D Video Coding

This paper presents an efficient view synthesis distortion estimation method for 3-D video. It also introduces the application of this method to Advanced Video Coding (AVC)- and High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC)-compatible 3-D video coding. Although the proposed view synthesis distortion scheme is generic, its use for actual 3-D video codec systems addresses the many issues caused by different video-coding formats and restrictions. The solutions for these issues are herein proposed. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme can achieve approximately 5.4% and 10.2% coding gains for AVC- and HEVC-compatible 3-D coding, respectively. In addition, the results show the remarkable complexity reduction of the scheme compared to the view synthesis optimization method currently used in 3-D-HEVC. The proposed method has been adopted into the presently developing AVC- and HEVC-compatible test model reference software.