A Fast Inter Mode Decision for Multiview Video Coding

Multiview video coding (MVC) plays a critical role in reducing the ultra high data bandwidth of 3-D video, and it has attracted great attention from industries and research institutes. However, with the increasing number of views, the complexity of MVC increases greatly which affects its realistic applications. In this paper, a fast Inter mode decision scheme for the Skip mode and the Inter sub modes is proposed. Based on the Rate- Distortion (RD) cost correlation between neighboring views, and the RD cost of different textural segmentation regions, a pre- decision of the Skip mode is introduced to reduce other modes' estimation. In addition, the estimated direction of Inter sub modes is predicted based on the optimal direction of the Inter16×16 mode. For the Peak Signal to Noise Ratio, experimental results show that an average 55% reduction of the total computation time with degradation of less than 0.01 dB is achieved as compared to the MVC reference software.