This article is part of the series 3D Image and Video Processing.

Open Access Research Article

Fast Macroblock Mode Selection Algorithm for Multiview Video Coding

Zongju Peng12, Gangyi Jiang1*, Mei Yu1 and Qionghai Dai3

Author Affiliations

1 Faculty of Information Science and Engineering, Ningbo University, Ningbo 315211, China

2 Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Science, Beijing 100080, China

3 Broadband Networks & Digital Media Lab, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China

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EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing 2008, 2008:393727  doi:10.1155/2008/393727


The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at: http://jivp.eurasipjournals.com/content/2008/1/393727


Received: 1 March 2008
Revisions received: 7 August 2008
Accepted: 14 October 2008
Published: 24 December 2008

© 2008 The Author(s).

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

Multiview video coding (MVC) plays an important role in three-dimensional video applications. Joint Video Team developed a joint multiview video model (JMVM) in which full-search algorithm is employed in macroblock mode selection to provide the best rate distortion performance for MVC. However, it results in a considerable increase in encoding complexity. We propose a hybrid fast macroblock mode selection algorithm after analyzing the full-search algorithm of JMVM. For nonanchor frames of the base view, the proposed algorithm halfway stops the macroblock mode search process by designing three dynamic thresholds. When nonanchor frames of the other views are being encoded, the macroblock modes can be predicted from the frames of the neighboring views due to the strong correlations of the macroblock modes. Experimental results show that the proposed hybrid fast macroblock mode selection algorithm promotes the encoding speed by 2.379.97 times without noticeable quality degradation compared with the JMVM.

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