Multi-view video coding with flexible view-temporal prediction structure for fast random access

Abstract

Multi-view video is becoming increasingly popular, as it provides users greatly enhanced viewing experience. Multi-view video coding (MVC) focuses on exploiting not only the temporal correlation among the adjacent pictures for each view, but also inter-view correlation. Though the coding efficiency is a key target for MVC, the view-temporal prediction structure for improving the compression efficiency usually results in the decoding delay and limits the random access ability. Random access ability is an important feature in MVC because it provides the view switching, temporal frame sweepingly browsing and other interactive abilities for the client users in multi-view video streaming. In this paper, we propose an algorithm to flexibly regulate the view-temporal prediction structure. It is able to achieve a good trade-off between compression performance and random access ability. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.