A fast direction predictor of inter frame prediction for multi-view video coding

Multi-view applications provide viewers a whole new viewing experience, and multi-view video coding (MVC) plays a key role in distributing multi-view video contents through networks with limited bandwidth. However, the computational load of a MVC encoder is pretty heavy so that it is hard to be realized in real-time applications. One reason behind this is that a MVC encoder has to make a decision of prediction direction based on rate-distortion optimization from both motion compensation prediction (MCP) and disparity compensation prediction (DCP) for multiple views. Motivated by this, this paper presents a novel fast MVC algorithm where a fast decision strategy of prediction direction of MCP and DCP is designed. Blocks with slow motion (SMBs) of all pictures in the base view and anchor pictures in enhancement views are identified based on MVs from MCP without additional computations. Then, the identification of SMBs in non-anchor frames of an enhancement view will be inferred from the SMBs of base view or the other coded enhancement views. Finally, the fast algorithm is achieved by applying MCP to SMBs of non-anchor pictures in enhancement views within the same GGOP. Experimental results conducted by JMVM 6.0 show that the average time reduction is 20% while the bitrate increase and PSNR loss are less than 0.25% and 0.0045 dB, respectively.