Exploring the Use of Early Inter-view Offset Estimation for Low Complexity MV-HEVC

The latest multi-view video coding generation MV-HEVC exploited effectively the interview redundant information in multi-view videos and provided high compression efficiency. However, increasing the distance between cameras during multi-view videos acquisition creates an inter-view disparity. This latter, influences the inter-view similarities and affects the disparity estimation which is requiring an individual estimation for each coding unit. This process increases the computational complexity of the MV-HEVC encoder. In this paper, we propose an improved disparity estimation by eliminating the offset between views during inter-view encoding. This elimination of the offset leads to the decrease of the search window in disparity estimation process according to the coding units size. For reliable motion estimation, an earlier decision of coding units splitting (EDCS) is also proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed approach roughly reduces the encoding time from 23.31 % to 44.35 % on average with negligible performance degradation.