Multi-view applications provide viewers a whole new viewing experience, and multi-view video coding (MVC) plays a key role in distributing multi-view video contents through networks with limited bandwidth. However, the computational load of a MVC encoder is pretty heavy so that it is hard to be realized in real-time applications. One reason behind this is that a MVC encoder has to make a decision of prediction direction based on rate-distortion optimization from both motion compensation prediction (MCP) and disparity compensation prediction (DCP) for multiple views. Motivated by this, this paper presents a novel fast MVC algorithm where a fast decision strategy of prediction direction of MCP and DCP is designed. Blocks with slow motion (SMBs) of all pictures in the base view and anchor pictures in enhancement views are identified based on MVs from MCP without additionalcomputations. Then, the identification of SMBs in nonanchor frames of an enhancement view will be inferred from the SMBs of base view or the other coded enhancement views. Finally, the fast algorithm is achieved by applying MCP to SMBs of non-anchor pictures in enhancement views within the same GGOP. Experimental results conducted by JMVM 6.0 show that the average time reduction is 20% while the bitrate increase and PSNR loss are less than 0.25% and 0.0045 dB, respectively.

The high computational complexity of multi-view video codecs makes it necessary to speed up for their realization in consumer electronics. Since fast encoding algorithms are expected to adapt to different video sequences, this paper proposes a fast algorithm that consists of fast mode decision and fast disparity estimation for multi-view video coding. The fast mode decision algorithm applies to both temporal and inter-view predictions. The candidates for mode decision are reduced based on a set of thresholds. Differ from the previous fast mode decision algorithms for MVC, this scheme determines the thresholds according to the online statistical analysis of motion and disparity costs of the first GOP in each view. Since the inter-view prediction is time consuming, we propose a fast disparity estimation algorithm to save encoding time. Experimental results show that our proposed scheme reduces the computational complexity significantly with negligible degradation of coding efficiency.Index Terms-Multi-view video coding, fast mode decision, statistical analysis, RD cost, motion and disparity estimation.