Efficient early direct mode decision for multi-view video coding

Multi-view video coding (MVC) uses various prediction modes and exhaustive mode decision to achieve high coding efficiency. However, the introduced heavy computational complexity becomes the bottleneck of the practical application of MVC. For this, an efficient early Direct mode decision for MVC is proposed in this paper. Based on the observation that the Direct mode is highly possible to be the optimal mode, the proposed method first computes the rate distortion (RD) cost of the Direct mode and compares this RD cost value with an adaptive threshold for providing an early termination chance as follows. If this RD cost value is smaller than the adaptive threshold, the Direct mode will be selected as the optimal mode and the checking process of the remaining modes will be skipped; otherwise, all the modes will be checked to select the one with the minimum RD cost as the optimal mode. Note that the above-mentioned adaptive threshold is determined as the median prediction value of a set of thresholds, which are derived by using the spatial, temporal and inter-view correlations between the current macroblock (MB) and its neighboring MBs, respectively. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed method is able to significantly reduce the computational complexity of MVC with negligible loss of coding efficiency, compared with the exhaustive mode decision in MVC. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.