A motion vector prediction method for multi-view video coding

This paper proposes a new motion vector (MV) prediction method in multi-view video coding (MVC). In order to exploit the information in adjacent views, inter-view MVs as well as temporal MVs are used in conventional MVC. Since the inter-view MVs are usually uncorrelated with the temporal MVs and most neighboring partitions have temporal MVs only, the conventional DPCM coding gain of inter-view MV is very low and thus the inter-view MVs are seldom selected. In order to increase the probability of interview MV selection, we define a virtual inter-view MV which can be generated from temporal MVs. Then, an inter-view MV is predicted using these neighboring virtual inter-view MVs, leading to less prediction error than using the temporal MVs. As a result, bit-rates are decreased by up to 9% for the view-temporal prediction structure. (C) 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.