Extended Inter-View Direct mode for Multiview Video Coding

This paper presents a novel compression tool that improves compression performance of Multiview Video Coding when depth information is available for the reference view. This tool is proposed as a new Extended Inter-View Direct mode of macroblock coding and exploits improved inter-view prediction of motion information. For this prediction, the idea is to use depth information in order to predict motion vectors more accurately, as it is possible in the classic Multiview Video Coding. The Extended Inter-View Direct mode is designed especially for the purpose of joint video and depth coding, where depth information for coded view is not available. Extensive experiments show the potential of the new mode to reduce bitstream by 2% to 11% depending on test sequence, compression scenario and variant of the state-of-the-art multiview compression reference technique used.