Low-complexity encoding scheme for multiview video content

On-site multiview video viewing system can provide people with more immersive viewing experience on various live video shows, such as sports and concerts. To address the high computational complexity of multi-view video coding, several researches have worked on fast motion estimation, fast disparity estimation, and/or fast mode decision. In this paper, we propose a low-complexity encoding scheme that can further exploit inter-view dependencies and depth information. A fast mode selection with threshold-based early termination is presented to select a minimal set of mode candidates according to the reference macroblocks of neighbouring views and expedite the mode decision process. Further, this study also demonstrates that disparity estimation computation and search ranges of both motion estimation and disparity estimation can be significantly refined by using inter-view dependencies and depth information. The experimental results show that the proposed encoding method reduces the coding time by 80% with a negligible PSNR loss.