Mode-correlation-based early termination mode decision for multi-view video coding

Exhaustive mode decision is exploited in multi-view video coding for effectively improving the coding efficiency, but at the expense of yielding higher computational complexity. In this paper, a fast mode decision algorithm, called the mode-correlation-based early termination (MET), is proposed. For each macroblock, the proposed MET algorithm always starts with checking whether the rate-distortion (RD) cost computed at the SKIP mode is below an adaptive threshold for providing a possible early termination chance. This adaptive threshold is calculated by using the mode correlation between the current macroblock and a set of adjacent macroblocks in the current view and its neighboring view. Experimental results have shown that compared with exhaustive mode decision, which is a default approach set in the JMVM reference software, the proposed MET algorithm achieves a reduction of the computational complexity by 65.91% and the total bit rate by 0.98% on average, while incurring only 0.06 dB loss in peak signal-to-noise ratio (PSNR).