Adaptive Search Region Decision for Multiview Video Coding

An appropriate search region is necessary for efficient multiview video coding (MVC). In this paper, the global disparity of two views is used to decide the size of the search region adaptively in the inter-view prediction of MVC. We first propose a simple method to obtain the global disparity vector (GDV) quickly, and analyze the relationship between the real disparity vector (DV) and GDV. It is found that the difference of DV and GDV is distributed within a small interval statistically. According to this property, an algorithm is designed to adaptively adjust the search region of MVC. The experimental results show that the search region decided by our method is appropriate for MVC, and the coding time can be reduced up to 26.7% without any considerable loss of compression efficiency.