Visual Media Coding and Transmission

6.4 Multi-view Coding via Virtual View Generation

(Portions reprinted, with permission, from E. Ekmekcioglu, S.T. Worrall, A.M. Kondoz, “Multi-view video coding via virtual view generation,” 26th Picture Coding Symposium, Portugal, November 2007. ©2007 EURASIP.)

6.4.1 Problem Definition and Objectives

In this research, a multi-view video coding method via generation of virtual image sequences is proposed. It is intended to improve the inter-view prediction process by exploiting the known scene geometry. Moreover, most future applications requiring MVC already necessitate the use of the scene geometry information [15,16], so it is beneficial to use this information during the compression stage.

Pictures are synthesized through a 3D warping method to estimate certain views in a multi-view set, which are then used as inter-view references. Depth maps and associated color video sequences are used for virtual view generation. JMVM is used for coding color videos and depth maps. Results are compared against the reference H.264/AVC simulcast method, where every view is coded without using any kind of inter-view prediction, under some low-delay coding scenarios. The rate-distortion of the proposed method outperforms that of the reference method at all bit rates.

6.4.2 Proposed Technical Solution

The proposed framework is composed of two main steps, namely the virtual view generation step through 3D depth-based warping technique, and the multi-view coding step using the generated virtual ...