Multiview video codec based on KTA techniques

Multi-view video coding (MVC) is a video coding standard developed by MPEG and VCEG for multi-view video. It showed average PSNR gain of 1.5dB compared with view-independent coding by H.264/AVC. However, because resolutions of multi-view video are getting higher for more realistic 3D effect, high performance video codec is needed. MVC adopted hierarchical B-picture structure and inter-view prediction as core techniques. The hierarchical B-picture structure removes the temporal redundancy, and the inter-view prediction reduces the inter-view redundancy by compensated prediction from the reconstructed neighboring views. Nevertheless, MVC has inherent limitation in coding efficiency, because it is based on H.264/AVC. To overcome the limit, an enhanced video codec for multi-view video based on Key Technology Area (KTA) is proposed. KTA is a high efficiency video codec by Video Coding Expert Group (VCEG), and it was carried out for coding efficiency beyond H.264/AVC. The KTA software showed better coding gain than H.264/AVC by using additional coding techniques. The techniques and the inter-view prediction are implemented into the proposed codec, which showed high coding gain compared with the view-independent coding result by KTA. The results presents that the inter-view prediction can achieve higher efficiency in a multi-view video codec based on a high performance video codec such as HEVC.