A novel fast search method to find disparity vectors in multiview video coding

Abstract

In multiview/3D video, the amount of data to be transmitted to the decoder increases proportionally with the number of cameras. One way to efficiently compress such video is to use Multiview Video Coding (MVC) which simultaneously reduces temporal and spatial redundancy within the same view and among multiple views. But, existing disparity estimation methods used to extract the redundancy among views are typically too computationally complex. In this paper, we propose a method for fast disparity estimation in multiview/3D video. First, for each block of the predicted frame, the view-dependent geometry and the depth information are used to find the corresponding block in the reference views. Then, a fast and greedy search method is proposed to search the surrounding areas to find the most similar block. Simulation results show that our proposed method achieves better bitrate and quality with much lower computational complexity compared to state-of-the-art methods.