AN OPTIMAL YET FAST PRUNING ALGORITHM TO REDUCE LATENCY IN MULTIVIEW PREDICTION STRUCTURES

We propose a new algorithm for the design of prediction struc-tures with low delay and limited penalty in the rate-distortion per-formance for multiview video coding schemes. This algorithm constitutes one of the elements of a framework for the analysis and optimization of delay in multiview coding schemes that is based in graph theory. The objective of the algorithm is to find the best combination of prediction dependencies to prune from a multiview prediction structure, given a number of cuts. Tak-ing into account the properties of the graph-based analysis of the encoding delay, the algorithm is able to find the best prediction dependencies to eliminate from an original prediction structure, while limiting the number of cut combinations to evaluate. We show that this algorithm obtains optimum results in the reduction of the encoding latency with a lower computational complexity than exhaustive search alternatives. Index Terms — 3D Video, video-conference, multiview video coding, prediction structure, low latency, graph theor