Low-complexity asymmetric multiview video coding

Multiview video coding (MVC) is currently under development by the Joint Video Team (JVT) as an extension to Advanced Video Coding (H264/AVC). Based on the suppression theory in binocular vision, the fidelity of one of the two views of a stereoscopic display can be reduced without noticeable degradation of subjective quality. Thus, in MVC, a subset of views can be coded with lower spatial resolution at negligible cost to subjective quality. Due to different resolutions, a downsampling process is required in an MVC decoder in order to enable motion compensation (MC) between views. In this paper, a low-complexity MC algorithm is proposed for MVC to enable inter-view prediction between pictures with different resolutions. It requires lower memory consumption and lower computational complexity compared with the conventional downsampled inter-view prediction, while providing comparable efficiency, as shown by the simulation results.