Viewpoint switching in multiview video streaming

In this paper, a novel coding scheme is proposed for switching viewpoint in multiview video streaming, which can switch freely and efficiently between any two adjacent views of the multiview video even if the switching point is not an intra frame. The proposed scheme implements the switch function at the predictive frames and improves the efficiency of the switched frames by limiting the mismatch between the references for the prediction and the reconstruction. Interview prediction, based on a global motion model, is used to reduce the differences between two adjacent views and the global disparity parameters are transmitted. To further improve the switching efficiency, a new rate-distortion optimization model is proposed to give the smart inter/intra selection when encoding. The H.264 coding scheme is employed as the platform. Experimental results show that, compared to switching directly, the proposed scheme can improve the coding efficiency up to 2 dB in PSNR.