Multilevel region of interest guided bit allocation for multiview video coding

Multiview video coding (MVC) is an efficient compression scheme, by which the large amount of multiview video data can be effectively processed. However, it ignores the characteristics of the human visual system. In this paper, we propose a multilevel region of interest (ROI) based bit allocation strategy for MVC, which can take advantage of the visual redundancy to improve encoding efficiency. First, the macro block (MB) saliency is derived from depth information of the video sequence, and the multilevel ROI segmentation is conducted based on the MB saliency distribution. Then, the multiview video bit allocation strategy based on multilevel ROI is proposed. We have evaluated system performance with several multiview video sequences in JMVC 8.5 reference software. Experimental results show that the quality of ROIs has a considerable improvement when the bit rate consumed is kept consistent with JMVC. Meanwhile, the proposed MVC method can save bit rate while maintaining the overall image quality. (C) 2013 Elsevier GmbH. All rights reserved.