MB-based Decoder Buffer Reduction for Multi-view Video Coding

Abstract

The hierarchical B picture (HBP) coding structure has been developed to improve the coding efficiency of multi-view video coding (MVC). HBP coding structure adopts temporal prediction and inter-view prediction to reduce the residual of the data in motion estimation. Since all the reference frames must be exhaustively searched for inter-view and temporal predictions, the encoder may take high computation time and need a large buffer size for the decoded picture. Hence, this paper proposes an effective reference frames determination method for motion estimation in HBP to reduce the computation time and buffer size. The proposed algorithm uses the relationship between the degree of motion and its predicted direction to select the prediction reference frame in the inter-view or temporal domain. The decoder buffer of the proposed algorithm only stores the reference region MBs instead of the entire reference picture, so that the decoder buffer size is significantly reduced. The experiment results show that the encoding time for the main views and the auxiliary views can be reduced by up to 65.39 % and 66.92 %, respectively. The decoder buffer size and bandwidth can be reduced by up to 70 % and 46.67 %, respectively. The results show that the proposed method not only achieves low computational complexity, but also reduces the decoded buffer size while maintaining high quality.