Compression Improvement via Reference Organization for 2D-multiview Content

One of the most challenging goals of future immersive services is to enable the observation of a scene from any viewpoint, thus making free-navigation possible under certain constraints. In order to provide such kind of services with smooth navigation, a huge amount of views should be available on the client's device. In particular, it is important for the case of 2D-multiview content, where cameras are positioned on a 2D grid in order to provide both horizontal and vertical parallax. This kind of content requires a large coding rate; therefore improving the compression performance of video encoders is especially relevant in this case. This paper studies how the encoder configuration affects the compression, by taking into account the spatial position of each camera. Four parameters are addressed in this work: coding order of the views, the number of reference lists, the number of reference pictures, and the ordering of pictures in the reference lists. An average of 12.0% bitrate saving is achieved for medium bitrate and 11.1% for low bitrate compared to the state of the art techniques.