New Multi-reference Frame Selection for Multiview Video Coding

With the development of multimedia technologies and the demand for three-dimensional video systems, multiview video coding (MVC) has attracted great attention from industries and research institutes. A joint multiview video model (JMVM) with multi-reference frame technology had beendeveloped, in which motion and disparity estimation for eliminating temporal and inter-view redundancies are employed in multi-reference frame technology to enhance the coding efficiency. However, the process of searching blocks with variable sizes for motion and disparity estimation in multi-reference frames significantly requires much more memory bandwidth and computational complexity relative to mono-view video coding systems. On the study of the statistical features of multi-reference frames in MVC, in this paper we propose a new fast multi-reference frame selection algorithm based on an adaptive threshold technology. The proposed algorithm can terminate the process of searching multi-reference frames early. An adaptive threshold technique is given and correlated with the types of frames. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can promote the encoding speed by 2.01 similar to 3.60 times without noticeable quality degradation compared with the JMVM 7.0.