Fast disparity motion estimation in MVC based on range prediction

In order to achieve a better coding performance in Multi- view video coding (MVC), the search range for both motion estimation (ME) and disparity estimation (DE) are set twice as large as necessary for ME alone, which brings great computational complexity to the encoder. Based on the behavior analysis of disparity estimation, a simple yet effective fast search algorithm, inter-view search range prediction (ISRP), is proposed in this paper. By applying this technique to full search or other fast search algorithms, a majority portion of the disparity search time could be removed while the coding performance is still maintained.