Temporal and inter-view skip modes for multi-view video coding

The multi-view video coding (MVC) standard includes all the highly advanced techniques of H.264/AVC. Especially, the techniques employed in motion estimation are extended to reduce not only temporal but inter-view redundancies in MVC, but motion vector prediction of a skip mode is only performed in a temporal direction. Therefore, we introduce a temporal skip mode using reference pictures at the same view as the current picture and an inter-view skip mode employing reference pictures at the different views from the current picture. The proposed method decides the best one of the temporal and the inter-view skip modes, based on rate-distortion (RD) optimization. Experimental results illustrate that the proposed method is significantly more efficient than the conventional method.