Multiview Video transcoding: From multiple views to single view

As multiview video is gaining more and more attentions, Multiview Video Coding (MVC) standard has been under development by the Joint Video Team as an extension to H.264/AVC. There will be increasingly more multiview video sources for both high end and low end consumers. Since a variety of end user devices shall not have multiview video decoders installed, multiview video transcoder is therefore needed in order for these users to enjoy the videos encoded by MVC standard. In this paper, we propose an algorithm for transcoding any viewpoint in bitstreams encoded by MVC to bitstreams that can be decoded by H.264/AVC decoders, regardless of the MVC prediction structure. The key component of this algorithm is the design of motion information reuse to implement simple motion refinement for inter-view coded macroblocks. Such reduced complexity implementation is especially applicable to the low power mobile devices. Experimental results show that, comparing with cascaded algorithm, the proposed scheme, with much reduced complexity, only suffers moderate performance loss.