Fast motion estimation with inter-view motion vector prediction for stereo and multiview video coding

3-D video will become one of the most important video technologies in the next generation of television. Due to ultra high data bandwidth requirement for 3-D video, effective compression technology becomes an essential part in the infrastructure. Thus stereo and multiview video coding (MVC) plays a critical role. However, MVC systems require much more computational complexity relative to mono-view video coding systems. Therefore, an efficient prediction scheme is necessary for encoding. In this paper, a new fast motion estimation (ME) algorithm is proposed. By utilizing disparity estimation (DE) to find corresponding blocks between different views, the coding information such as motion vectors can be effectively shared and reused from the coded view channel. Therefore, the computation for ME in most view channels can be greatly reduced. Experimental results show that compared with the full search block matching algorithm applied to both ME and DE, the proposed algorithm saves 95% computation with near-FSBMA quality.