An improved rate-distortion model for multiview video coding

An improved rate-distortion model is developed to compare the performances of different multiview video coding (MVC) schemes. We first formulate the coding efficiency of one frame with a given temporal and inter-view prediction configuration. The overall performance of a MVC scheme is then obtained by averaging the coding efficiencies of all frames in all views, with different prediction configurations. We then apply the model to evaluate the theoretical performances of various MVC schemes, including the motion and disparity estimation-based MVC, the rectified view interpolation-based MVC, and the rectified view extrapolation-based MVC. The findings of these theoretical studies agree well with the experimental results.