Efficient view-temporal prediction structures for multi-view video coding

To compress multi-view video, spatial redundancy between adjacent view sequences as well as temporal redundancy need to be eliminated. View-temporal prediction structures are proposed, which can be adjusted to various characteristics of multi-view videos. The proposed prediction structure achieves better coding performance than the reference prediction structure for the standardisation of multi-view video coding.     

Directional residue prediction with motion alignment for video coding

A directional residue prediction method is proposed, in which motionaligned neighbouring residues are used in the directional prediction for residues in an inter-block. Corresponding motion estimation strategies are also designed. Experiments show that the bit rate saving can be up to 20% with a negligible decoding complexity increase.     

多视点视频编码技术的专利分析

多视点视频编码技术MVC是3D视频技术中的重要技术,而3D视频技术是电视产业的未来。本文针对MVC技术在国内专利库进行了全面检索,并从统计结果初步分析了产业发展趋势、公司战略部署、国内外专利质量和专利保护意识的对比,为业内人士提供了相关信息的普及,在此基础上,进一步对国内产研结合的可行性进行了分析,通过产研联合申请的成功案例介绍,为国内的公司和高校的共同研发提供借鉴。     

联合彩色信息的多视点深度视频视差矢量预测

多视点加深度(MVD)格式可以利用虚拟视点绘制技术生成任意视点的视频,能高效地向观看者提供立体感知。由于MVD中的深度视频与对应的彩色视频采集于同一场景,具有高度的相关性。因此,深度视频可以利用已编码的彩色信息辅助编码。提出一种联合彩色信息的多视点深度视频视差矢量预测方法。该方法首先获得当前编码深度块对应位置的彩色块,提取彩色块预测得到的视差矢量作为深度块的一个候选视差矢量。然后,利用深度块信息计算得到另一个候选视差矢量。最后,对两个候选视差矢量通过计算下采样均方差,选择更精确的一个作为当前深度块的视差矢量预测值。实验结果表明,所提出的方法性能优于3D-HEVC编码平台HTM。     

Efficient multi-view video coding using inter-view information

Multi-view video coding (MVC) has been extended from H.264/AVC to improve the coding efficiency of multi-view video. This paper proposes a fast mode decision algorithm which can make an early decision on the correct mode partition to solve the issue of the enormous computational complexity. The best modes of the reference views are utilized to determine the complexity of the macroblock (MB) in the current view, the mode candidates needed to be calculated can then be obtained according to the complexity. If the complexity is low or medium, the search range can be reduced. The threshold of the rate-distortion cost for the current MB is calculated using the co-located and neighboring MBs in previously coded view and is utilized as the criterion for early termination. The motion vector difference in the reference view is applied to dynamically adjust the search range in the current MB. Experimental results prove that the proposed algorithm achieves a time saving of 81.05% for a fast TZ search and 87.85% for full search, and still maintains quality performance and bitrate.     

Efficient early direct mode decision for multi-view video coding

Multi-view video coding (MVC) uses various prediction modes and exhaustive mode decision to achieve high coding efficiency. However, the introduced heavy computational complexity becomes the bottleneck of the practical application of MVC. For this, an efficient early Direct mode decision for MVC is proposed in this paper. Based on the observation that the Direct mode is highly possible to be the optimal mode, the proposed method first computes the rate distortion (RD) cost of the Direct mode and compares this RD cost value with an adaptive threshold for providing an early termination chance as follows. If this RD cost value is smaller than the adaptive threshold, the Direct mode will be selected as the optimal mode and the checking process of the remaining modes will be skipped; otherwise, all the modes will be checked to select the one with the minimum RD cost as the optimal mode. Note that the above-mentioned adaptive threshold is determined as the median prediction value of a set of thresholds, which are derived by using the spatial, temporal and inter-view correlations between the current macroblock (MB) and its neighboring MBs, respectively. Experimental results have demonstrated that the proposed method is able to significantly reduce the computational complexity of MVC with negligible loss of coding efficiency, compared with the exhaustive mode decision in MVC.     

Coding statistics based fast mode decision for multi-view video coding

Reduction of high computational complexity of multi-view video coding (MVC) is necessary for realization in consumer electronics. Since mode decision is one of the key computational bottlenecks of multi-view video encoders, this paper proposes a coding statistics based fast mode decision algorithm. First of all, a rate–distortion cost based fast DIRECT mode decision algorithm early terminates the mode decision process if possible. Next, the candidates for Inter modes are reduced by taking the advantage of the correlation between an optimal mode and motion cost. The proper thresholds to reduce the candidates for the above two fast algorithms can be easily derived from exponential functions at run time. Finally, motion vector difference based motion characteristics is referred to further speed up the mode decision process of Inter modes. The experimental results show that the proposed scheme reduces up to 70.82% of encoding time with negligible degradation of RD performance.     

Low-bit-rate video coding using dense motion field and uncoveredbackground prediction

It is well known that accurate dense motion field can improve the video coding efficiency. This paper presents a novel Markov random field (MRF) model that estimates both the dense motion and uncovered background fields in image sequences, and the application of these estimates in H.263-based video coding framework.     

Bottom-up motion compensated prediction in wavelet domain for spatially scalable video coding

A new in-band motion compensation algorithm for wavelet-based video coding is proposed: the bottom-up prediction algorithm (BUP). This algorithm overcomes the periodic shift-invariance of the discrete wavelet transform (DWT) and is formalised into prediction rules using filtering operations. The combination of all prediction rules of the BUP algorithm defines a new transform: the bottom-up overcomplete DWT or BUP ODWT, which is shift-invariant. The envisaged application for the BUP algorithm is spatially scalable wavelet video coding.     

Error resilience of multireference motion compensated prediction in video coding

Standard coded video is vulnerable to transmission errors when transmitted over unreliable channels. The authors propose using multireference motion compensated prediction (MCP) to provide resilience to transmission errors. Both the concealment error and propagation error can be reduced in multireference MCR. First, using the multiple motion vectors associated with each coded block, a concealment scheme of low complexity with small concealment error is proposed. Then the theoretical performance limit of propagation error and coding efficiency in multireference MCP is analysed. Through a numerical solution based on the theoretical performance limit, it is found that a multireference MCP scheme can achieve greater propagation error attenuation than the traditional single-reference MCP scheme. The numerical solution also demonstrates that the performance of the multireference MCP average scheme approaches the theoretical performance limit, with coding efficiency higher than the traditional single-reference MCP scheme. Finally, results of a simulation under the assumed packet loss environment typical of the Internet are given. Simulation results demonstrate that video coding with multireference MCP performs much better than the conventional H.263 coding scheme in a lossy environment.     

基于帧内帧间联合预测的深度视频编码方法

在基于多视点加深度(MVD)格式的视频编码方案中,深度视频的编码性能直接影响最终绘制的虚拟视点的质量。对于具有边界的深度块而言,传统的帧内预测和帧间预测模式仍存在一定的提升空间。因此,文中提出一种基于帧内帧间联合预测的深度视频编码方法。该方法首先获取当前深度块的最优帧内预测模式和最优帧间预测模式。然后,将这两种模式应用于边界深度块的不同区域。最后,自适应地调整预测结果的加权系数,实现联合预测。实验结果表明,相对于3D-HEVC平台的传统预测模式,本方法实现了更好的编码性能。     

Utilisation of downsampling for arbitrary views in multi-view video coding

The effect of using downsampling for arbitrary views inside a multi- view sequence on the multi-view coding (MVC) efficiency is explored. A bit rate adaptive approach is proposed to consider downsampling certain views prior to encoding with relevant downscaling ratios. The inter-view references, if any, are downsampled to the same resolution and the decoded view is upsampled back to the original resolution. The results over several multi-view test sequences imply that up to 0.9 dB gain or 20% reduction in bit rate can be achieved, reducing the computational complexity in the encoder significantly at the same time.     

Motion vector quantization for video coding

A new algorithm is developed for the vector quantization of motion vectors. This algorithm, called motion vector quantization (MVQ), simultaneously estimates and vector quantizes the motion vectors by reinterpreting the block matching algorithm as a type of vector quantization. An iterative design algorithm, based on this concept, is developed. In addition to reducing rate for fixed length encoding, the algorithm also reduces the computation considerably. We include coding simulation results on the Flower Garden sequence.     

A rate-distortion analysis on motion prediction efficiency and mode decision for scalable wavelet video coding

A rate-distortion model for describing the motion prediction efficiency in interframe wavelet video coding is proposed in this paper. Different from the non-scalable video coding, the scalable wavelet video coding needs to operate under multiple bitrate conditions and it has an open-loop structure. The conventional Lagrangian multiplier, which is widely used to solve the rate-distortion optimization problems in video coding, does not fit well into the scalable wavelet structure. In order to find the rate-distortion trade-off due to different bits allocated to motion and textual information, we suggest a motion information gain (MIG) metric to measure the motion prediction efficiency. Based on this metric, a new cost function for mode decision is proposed. Compared with the conventional Lagrangian method, our experiments show that the proposed method is less extraction-bitrate dependent and generally improves both the PSNR performance and the visual quality for the scalability cases.     

一种新的视频编码的块运动估计算法

本文提出了一种连续判别的非线性预测搜索ＮＰＳＳＤ块运动估计算法,可以用于视频压缩的一些国际标准,如Ｈ．２６１,Ｈ．２６３,ＭＰＥＧ１,ＭＰＥＧ２,ＨＤＴＶ中。ＮＰＳＳＤ算法充分利用了序列图像的实际运动矢量与预测矢量之间的位移的空间分布特性－－中心偏置分布特性和时间上的相关特性,并在搜索过程中采用了中止判别和搜索判别,可以明显地减少运动搜索复杂度。仿真表明这种算法减少了搜索次数,提高了搜索效率,降低     

Residual motion coding method supporting error concealment in low bitrate video coding

A residual motion coding (RMC) method supporting error concealment (EC) in low bitrate video coding is proposed. In the RMC method, the residual motion vector (RMV) is interleaved into the bitstream at the encoder to improve the error resilience of MVs. Experimental results show that the EC using RMV performs better than conventional EC methods.     

Color correction algorithm based on camera characteristics for multi-view video coding

Various types of multi-view camera systems have been proposed for capturing three dimensional scenes. Yet, color distributions among multi-view images remain inconsistent in most cases, degrading multi-view video coding performance. In this paper, we propose a color correction algorithm based on the camera characteristics to effectively solve such a problem. Initially, we model camera characteristics and estimate their coefficients by means of correspondences between views. To consider occlusion in multi-view images, correspondences are extracted via feature-based matching. During coefficient estimation with nonlinear regression, we remove outliers in the extracted correspondences. Consecutively, we generate lookup tables for each camera using the model and estimated coefficients. Such tables are employed for fast color converting in the final color correction process. The experimental results show that our algorithm enhances coding efficiency with gains of up to 0.9 and 0.8 dB for luminance and chrominance components, respectively. Further, the method also improves subjective viewing quality and reduces color distance between views.     

Scalable motion vector coding

Scalable wavelet-based video codecs using spatial-domain motion compensated temporal filtering require a quality-scalable motion vector codec to support a large range of bit rates with optimal compression efficiency. Introduced is a new prediction-based architecture for quality-scalable motion vector coding that outperforms the state-of-the-art wavelet-based techniques previously proposed in the literature.     

Block-based motion field segmentation for video coding

In the past few years, motion compensation has been widely used in the coding of image sequences. Most of motion estimation and compensation schemes belong to block-based framework. The framework simplifies the complexity of motion estimation, but gives over constraints to the motion field, which results in worse accuracy on the boundary of moving objects. This paper presents a novel technique for raising motion field accuracy. It uses several pre-defined pattern types to segment the motion fields of the previous frame of a sequence. The segmentation is based on the MAP framework that uses iterative method to obtain the solution. In addition, we develop a predictive scheme to predict the location of motion field discontinuities in the current frame, which further reduces the side information for the representation of segmentation.     

Novel two-layer motion estimation for video coding

In this paper,we proposed a novel Two-layer Motion Estimation （TME） which searches motion vectors on two layers with partial distortion measures in order to reduce the overwhelming computational complexity of Motion Estimation （ME） in video coding.A layer is an image which is derived from the reference frame such that the sum of a block of pixels in the reference frame determines the point of a layer.It has been noticed on different video sequences that many motion vectors on the layers are the same as those searched on the reference frame.The proposed TME performs a coarse search on the first layer to identify the small region in which the best candidate block is likely to be positioned and then perform local refined search on the next layer to pick the best candidate block in the located small area.The key feature of TME is its flexibility of mixing with any fast search algorithm.Experimental results on a wide variety of video sequences show that the proposed algorithm has achieved both fast speed and good motion prediction quality when compared to well known as well as the state-of-the-art fast block matching algorithms.