Scalable prediction structure for multiview video coding

Both temporal prediction and inter-view prediction are employed to improve the coding efficiency in multiview video coding. Hierarchical B pictures are usually used as the basic structure for temporal prediction. The inter-view prediction in each temporal hierarchy level brings different improvement to the entire coding efficiency. We propose a scalable prediction structure in which inter-view prediction would be disabled if the picture redundancy can be almost exploited by temporal prediction and intra prediction. In this way, time-consuming computation of disparity estimation can be saved. Experimental results show that lower encoding complexity, smaller decoded picture buffer size and better random access ability can be achieved with a slightly gain loss.