3D motion estimation for 3D video coding

H.264/MVC multi-view video coding provides a better compression rate compared to the simulcast coding using hierarchical B-picture prediction structure exploiting inter- and intra-view redundancy. However, this technique imposes random access frame delay as well as requiring huge computational time. In this paper a novel technique is proposed using 3D motion estimation (3D-ME) to overcome the problems. In the 3D-ME technique, a 3D frame is formed using the same temporal frames of all views and ME is carried out for the current 3D frame using the immediate previous 3D frame as a reference frame. As the correlation among the intra-view images is higher compared to the correlation among the inter-view images, the proposed 3D-ME technique reduces the overall computational time and eliminates the frame delay with comparable rate-distortion (RD) performance compared to H.264/MVC. Another technique is also proposed in the paper where an extra reference 3D frame comprising dynamic background frames (the most common frame of a scene i.e., McFIS) of each view is used for 3D-ME. Experimental results reveal that the proposed 3D-ME-McFIS technique outperforms the H.264/MVC in terms of improved RD performance by reducing computational time and by eliminating the random access frame delay.