High-speed inter-view frame mode decision procedure for multi-view video coding

With the amazing development of visual identification systems, multi-view video which is one of the main types of three-dimensional (3D) video signals, captured by a set of video cameras from various viewpoints, has attracted much interest recently. The multi-view video coding (MVC) uses the joint multi-view video model (JMVM) established on H.264/AVC as the core codec to achieve excellent coding efficiency. However, the concomitant problem is the huge encoding complexity especially due to the heavy Rate-to-Distortion Cost (RDCost) computational load of the mode decision (MD) process, which limits the applications of MVC for mobile terminals and embedded systems. In this paper, a high-speed MD (HSMD) algorithm is proposed for the inter-view frames of multi-view video signal. The redundant candidate modes of each macroblock (MB) in the inter-view frames are eliminated to reduce the original RDCost computational load by utilizing multiple efficiency parameters. The quantitative analysis verifies our proposal in theory and the simulation results show that the proposed HSMD algorithm can reduce the encoding time by over 90% for the inter-view video frames with negligible quality loss compared with the original JMVM codec. The proposed algorithm can be widely employed for real-time multi-view signal encoding especially under the mobile and embedded environments to realize the real-time encoding process.

► A high-speed MD (HSMD) algorithm is proposed for the inter-view frames of multi-view video signal.
► It can reduce the encoding time by over 90% with negligible quality loss.
► The proposed algorithm can be widely employed for real-time multi-view signal encoding especially under the mobile and embedded environments to realize the real-time encoding process.