Adaptive mode decision for multiview video coding based on macroblock position constraint model

Multiview video coding (MVC) exploits mode decision, motion estimation and disparity estimation to achieve high compression ratio, which results in an extensive computational complexity. This paper presents an efficient mode decision approach for MVC using a macroblock (MB) position constraint model (MPCM). The proposed approach reduces the number of candidate modes by utilizing the mode correlation and rate distortion cost (RD cost) in the previously encoded frames/views. Specifically, the mode correlations both in the temporal-spatial domain and the inter-view are modeled with MPCM. Then, MPCM is exploited to select the optimal prediction direction for the current encoding MB. Finally, the inter mode is early determined in the optimal prediction direction. Experimental results show that the proposed method can save 86.03 % of encoding time compared with the exhaustive mode decision used in the reference software of joint multiview video coding, with only 0.077 dB loss in Bjontegaard delta peak signal-to-noise ratio (BDPSNR) and 2.29 % increment of the total Bjontegaard delta bit rate (BDBR), which is superior to the performances of state-of-the-art approaches.