Abstract
Multiview video has gained a wide interest recently. The huge amount of data needed to be processed by multiview applications is a heavy burden for both transmission and decoding. The joint video team has recently devoted part of its effort to extend the widely deployed H.264/AVC standard to handle multiview video coding (MVC). The MVC extension of H.264/AVC includes a number of new techniques for improved coding efficiency, reduced decoding complexity, and new functionalities for multiview operations. MVC takes advantage of some of the interfaces and transport mechanisms introduced for the scalable video coding (SVC) extension of H.264/AVC, but the system level integration of MVC is conceptually more challenging as the decoder output may contain more than one view and can consist of any combination of the views with any temporal level. The generation of all the output views also requires careful consideration and control of the available decoder resources. In this paper, multiview applications and solutions to support generic multiview as well as 3D services are introduced. The proposed solutions, which have been adopted to the draft MVC specification, cover a wide range of requirements for 3D video related to interface, transport of the MVC bitstreams, and MVC decoder resource management. The features that have been introduced in MVC to support these solutions include marking of reference pictures, supporting for efficient view switching, structuring of the bitstream, signalling of view scalability supplemental enhancement information (SEI) and parallel decoding SEI.
Highlights
Three-dimensional video has gained significant interest recently
This section reviews the concept of network abstraction layer units (NAL units) and summarizes how the NAL unit types defined in H.264/AVC and scalable video coding (SVC) are reused for multiview video coding (MVC)
We present an analysis of the buffer requirement for decoding of MVC bitstreams, which has been discussed in more details in [24]
Summary
Three-dimensional video has gained significant interest recently. with the advances in acquisition and display technologies, 3D video is becoming a reality in consumer domain with different application opportunities. New mechanisms are needed in MVC at least related to view scalability, interview prediction structure, coexisting of decoded pictures from multiple dimensions (i.e., both the temporal and view dimensions) in the decoded picture buffer, multiple representations in the display, and parallel decoding at the decoder These mechanisms cover the challenges and requirements, identified above, for 3D video services, except for the compression efficiency challenge. The main MVC features discussed in this paper include reference picture management to achieve optimal memory consumption at the decoder, time-first coding to support consistent system level design, SEI messages, and other features for view and scalability information provisioning, adaptation, random access, view switching, and reference picture list construction.
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