Multi-view video coding based on H.264/AVC using hierarchical B-frames

New applications such as 3D video and free viewpoint video require efficient compression of multi-view video, where the same scene is captured by several synchronized cameras. In a statistical analysis it is shown that multi-view video contains a large degree of inter-view statistical dependencies in addition to the temporal statistical dependencies that can be exploited for video compression. Based on this analysis an efficient prediction structure is presented that applies hierarchical B pictures in temporal and inter-view prediction. The multi- view video data are reorganized into a single uncompressed video stream that is fed into a standard H.264/MPEG4-AVC encoder, thus the resulting bitstream is standard-conforming. The presented results including objective and subjective evaluation prove the efficiency of the authors' approach. It has been selected by MPEG as reference for the development of a new standard for multi-view video coding that is expected to be available in early 2008.