A new rate distortion model for multi-view/3D video coding

A typical scenario for multi-view 3D consists of several 3D video sequences captured simultaneously from the same scene with the help of multiple cameras from different positions and through different angles. Due to the extremely high bandwidth of multi-view/3D video, rate control is one of the key factors influencing its quality. In this paper, we investigate the impacts of multi-view/3D video characteristics on the bit rate of a compressed video and we propose an analytical view-level rate model for multi-view video coding. Our rate model takes into account both previous theoretical results as well as new results specifically obtained for multi-view video and confirmed by comprehensive practical experiments. These new results reveal a close relationship between the rate of each view and consequently the perceived quality by users, available bandwidth and processing power. Simulation results indicate that our model can predict the rate of each view with relatively high precision and a low estimation error of 20% on average.