The Emerging MVC Standard for 3D Video Services

Abstract

Multiview video has gained a wide interest recently. The huge amount of data needed to be processed by multiview applications is a heavy burden for both transmission and decoding. The joint video team has recently devoted part of its effort to extend the widely deployed H.264/AVC standard to handle multiview video coding (MVC). The MVC extension of H.264/AVC includes a number of new techniques for improved coding efficiency, reduced decoding complexity, and new functionalities for multiview operations. MVC takes advantage of some of the interfaces and transport mechanisms introduced for the scalable video coding (SVC) extension of H.264/AVC, but the system level integration of MVC is conceptually more challenging as the decoder output may contain more than one view and can consist of any combination of the views with any temporal level. The generation of all the output views also requires careful consideration and control of the available decoder resources. In this paper, multiview applications and solutions to support generic multiview as well as 3D services are introduced. The proposed solutions, which have been adopted to the draft MVC specification, cover a wide range of requirements for 3D video related to interface, transport of the MVC bitstreams, and MVC decoder resource management. The features that have been introduced in MVC to support these solutions include marking of reference pictures, supporting for efficient view switching, structuring of the bitstream, signalling of view scalability supplemental enhancement information (SEI) and parallel decoding SEI.

Subjective study on compressed asymmetric stereoscopic video

“…Multiview Video Coding (MVC) [1], recently standardized as an annex to the widely used Advanced Video Coding (H.264/AVC) standard [2], has potential to become a popular compression format for stereoscopic video. While MVC provides a considerable compression improvement compared to H.264/AVC simulcast mainly thanks to interview prediction, further compression without compromising the visual quality is desirable for many applications.…”

An Empirical Model of Multiview Video Coding Efficiency for Wireless Multimedia Sensor Networks

“…We consider the recently defined H.264 MVC [17]; the study can be extended to different, computationally efficient encoders [2] explicitly designed for WMSNs. The CSA is estimated on a per-frame basis as the number of pixels in the rectangular overlapping region between the view , and a suitably displaced version of the second view , as shown for instance in Fig.…”

Quality assessment of asymmetric stereo pair formed from decoded and synthesized views

“…Two anchors, i.e., Multiview Video Coding (MVC) [10], specified in Annex H of H.264/MPEG-4 Part 10, and High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) [11], were also included in the set of coding technologies under assessment.…”