An independent motion and disparity vector prediction method for multiview video coding

The inter-view prediction is used as well as the temporal prediction in order to exploit both the temporal and inter-view redundancies in multiview video coding. Accordingly, the multiview video coding has two types of motion vectors that are the temporal motion vector and the disparity vector, respectively. The disparity vector is generally uncorrelated with the temporal motion vector. However, they are used together to predict the motion vector regardless of their types, therefore an efficiency of the conventional predictive coding of multiview video coding is decreased. In order to increase the accuracy of the predicted motion vector, a new motion vector prediction method including virtual temporal motion vector and virtual disparity vector is proposed for both the multiview video and multiview video plus depth formats. The experimental results show that the proposed method can reduce the coding bitrates by 6.5% in average and 14.6% at maximum in terms of Bjontegaard metric compared to the conventional method.