Extending single-view scalable video coding to multi-view based on H.264/AVC

An extension of single-view scalable video coding to multiview is presented in this paper. Scalable video coding is recently developed in the Joint Video Team of ISO/IEC MPEG and ITU-T VCEG named Joint Scalable Video Model. The model includes temporal, spatial and quality scalability enhancing a H.264/AVC base layer. To remove redundancy between views a hierarchical decomposition in a similar way to the temporal direction is applied. The codec is based on this technology and supports open-loop as well as closed-loop controlled encoding. The advantage of this approach lies in its compatibility to the state of the art single-view video codec H.264/AVC and its simple decomposition structure. Encoding a base view using H.264/AVC syntax, any standard single-view decoder is able to decode the data. The hierarchical decomposition structure allows efficient access to all views and frames inside a view. This is especially important for video-based-rendering and multi-view displays, which have different requirements. The chosen decomposition structure also supports parallel processing. Gain in objective as well as subjective quality was achieved for some test sequences using a single layer. The results were compared to JSVM 5.1 (simulcast).