Fast inter-mode decision in multi-view video plus depth coding

Motion and disparity estimations are employed in Multi-view Video Coding (MVC) to remove redundancies present between temporal and different viewpoint frames, respectively, in both the color and the depth multi-view videos. These constitute the major computational expensive tasks of the video encoder, as iterative search for the optimal mode and its appropriate compensation vectors is employed to reduce the Rate-Distortion Optimization (RDO) cost function. This paper proposes a solution to limit the number of modes that are tested for RDO to encode the inter-view predicted views. The decision is based on the encoded information obtained from the corresponding Macroblock in the Base view, identified accurately by using the multi-view geometry together with the depth data. Results show that this geometric technique manages to reduce about 70% of the estimation's computational time and can also be used with fast geometric estimations to reduce up to 95% of the original encoding time. These gains are obtained with little degradation on the multi-view video quality for both color and depth MVC.