Low-complexity encoding techniques for multiview video

MVC (Multiview Video Coding), as an international encoding standard, gets a rather good performance by fully utilizing the temporal correlation and inter-view correlation, meanwhile, it results in great complexity. This paper presents a low complexity encoding technique for multi-view video. The main contributions can be summarized as follows. First, the macroblock-based inter-view prediction is not employed for the non-anchor pictures of B-views, if the temporal correlation of the corresponding GOP unit is strong enough. Second, when the disparity estimation of a macroblock is performed, the search range is adjusted according to the mode size distribution of the neighboring view. Experimental results show that, compared to reference software JMVM 5.1, the average time reduction is 86.63% while the bitrate increase and PSNR loss are less than 0.20% and 0.02 dB, respectively.