Fast disparity and motion estimation based on correlations for multiview video coding

Recently, multiview video coding has attracted great attention from industries and research institutes. However, the heavy computational complexity limits its practical applications. In this paper, a fast disparity and motion estimation for multiview video coding is presented, based on the correlations between the neighboring cameras and between the motion and the disparity. In the proposed approach, first, a search region estimation is proposed to reduce the disparity estimation complexity according to that the camera set is usually fixed and therefore the disparity between the two neighboring views can be limited to an estimable range. Second, a motion vector derivation is given based on the geometric relationship between the motion and the disparity. In addition, an early termination scheme is provided to further reduce the number of reference frames. The experimental results show that roughly 50% time saving for disparity and motion computing can be reached when compared to the anchor in multiview video coding test model JSVM only with negligible coding efficiency loss.