A Fast GPU-Based Motion Estimation Algorithm for HD 3D Video Coding

H.264/AVC is the commercial standard currently most in use for video and is based on single view (mono view). Recently, the video community has also standardized an H.264/AVC extension for supporting 3D video sensation which is referred to as Multiview Video Coding (MVC). Like H.264/AVC, MVC includes temporal and spatial prediction but also includes inter-view prediction as well as disparity estimation. Until now, in H.264/AVC the inter prediction techniques have been the most time-consuming tasks and, thus, in MVC with its new interview predictions the encoding time is even higher. This paper proposes a GPU-based algorithm for both temporal and interview prediction. The algorithm proposed is able to perform this complex prediction task by means of an efficient distribution of all the computations over the GPU and also tries to mitigate the sequential dependencies. The approach can achieve a remarkable time reduction of up to 98% with only a negligible loss in coding efficiency. Moreover, this paper shows that the proposed GPU-based algorithm is more energy efficient and thus, requires less energy than the sequential reference.