Enhanced view random access ability for multiview video coding

Apart from the efficient compression, reducing the complexity of the view random access is one of the most important requirements that should be considered in multiview video coding. In order to obtain an efficient compression, both temporal and inter-view correlations are exploited in the multiview video coding schemes, introducing higher complexity in the temporal and view random access. We propose an inter-view prediction structure that aims to lower the cost of randomly accessing any picture at any position and instant, with respect to the multiview reference model JMVM and other recent relevant works. The proposed scheme is mainly based on the use of two base views (I-views) in the structure with selected positions instead of a single reference view as in the standard structures. This will, therefore, provide a direct inter-view prediction for all the remaining views and will ensure a low-delay view random access ability while maintaining a very competitive bit-rate performance with a similar video quality measured in peak signal-to-noise ratio. In addition to a new evaluation method of the random access ability, the obtained results show a significant improvement in the view random accessibility with respect to other reported works.