Coding efficiency and complexity analysis of MVC prediction structures

Based on the idea to exploit the statistical dependencies from both temporal and inter-view reference pictures for motion compensated prediction this paper presents a systematic evaluation of multi-view video coding with optimized prediction structures. The compression method is based on the multiple reference picture technique in the H.264/AVC video coding standard. The advantages of hierarchical B pictures for temporal prediction are combined with inter-view prediction for different temporal hierarchy levels starting from simulcast coding with no inter-view prediction up to full level inter-view prediction. When using inter-view prediction at key picture temporal level average gains of 1.4 dB PSNR are reported while additionally using inter-view prediction at non-key picture temporal levels average gains of 1.6 dB PSNR are reported. For some cases gains of more than 3 dB corresponding to bit rate savings of up to 50% are obtained.