Low Bit-Rate Object-based Multi-view Video Coding using MVC

Work is currently underway to develop a new multi-view video coding (MVC) standard, based on the recent H.264/AVC standard. Recent work has shown, however, that object-based video coding can provide higher performance than H.264, especially at low bit rates and in sequences containing rotating camera motion and moving objects in the foreground. In this paper, we propose an object-based extension to MVC, in which sequences are segmented into foreground and background objects, with each object coded using H.264/AVC for single-view sequences and MVC for multi-view sequences. Experimental results show that the object-based approach significantly outperforms the basic MVC at low bit rates.