Content-Aware Prediction Algorithm With Inter-View Mode Decision for Multiview Video Coding

3-D video will become one of the most significant video technologies in the next-generation television. Due to the ultra high data bandwidth requirement for 3-D video, effective compression technology becomes an essential part in the infrastructure. Thus multiview video coding (MVC) plays a critical role. However, MVC systems require much more memory bandwidth and computational complexity relative to mono-view video coding systems. Therefore, an efficient prediction scheme is necessary for encoding. In this paper, a new fast prediction algorithm, content-aware prediction algorithm (CAPA) with inter-view mode decision, is proposed. By utilizing disparity estimation (DE) to find corresponding blocks between different views, the coding information, such as rate-distortion cost, coding modes, and motion vectors, can be effectively shared and reused from the coded view channel. Therefore, the computation for motion estimation (ME) in most view channels can be greatly reduced. Experimental results show that compared with the full search block matching algorithm (FSBMA) applied to both ME and DE, the proposed algorithm saves 98.4-99.1% computational complexity of ME in most view channels with negligible quality loss of only 0.03-0.06 dB in PSNR.