Rate Distortion Optimized Inter-View Frame Level Bit Allocation Method for MV-HEVC

In multi-view video coding, since inter-view prediction has been adopted as an important coding tool which could improve coding efficiency greatly, inter-view dependency is inevitable, i.e., the distortion of the reference view (RV) picture could be propagated to the non-reference view (NRV) pictures. Therefore, in order to achieve higher coding efficiency, the inter-view dependency must be taken into account for inter-view bit allocation. In this paper, the inter-view dependency is analyzed in detail, and a rate-distortion (RD) model for NRVs is derived by taking the distortion of RV into account. Based on the derived RD model, the inter-view bit allocation is represented as a mathematical problem with an analytic form, and is solved by a convex optimization (Lagrangian Multiplier) method. Experimental results demonstrate that the RD performance and the inter-view quality consistency of the proposed method is better than existing methods, while the complexity of the proposed method is comparable with the existing methods.