Interactive multi-view video presents new types of
video capture systems, video formats, video compression algorithms, and services. Many video cameras are allocated to capture an event from various related locations and directions. The captured videos are compressed and are sent to a
server in real-time. A big difference from the conventional schemes and the on-line compression of the interactive multi-view video
system of the invention lies in a unique “STATIC” mode that is introduced to speed up the predictive coding. To find the
STATIC mode, it is necessary to calculate the difference between the original image and a
reference image. To further reduce the computing complexity, the decision of whether to use this
STATIC mode or not is determined jointly among all views. In the
STATIC mode, the involved
macroblock (MB) will be coded like the traditional INTER mode, while its corresponding
reference image, which will be used by the next frame for temporal prediction, is simply copied from its previous reconstructed image. As a result, none of de-quantization, inverse DCT and motion compensation is required for creating the
reference image of this MB. In addition to the new coding mode, joint
motion estimation (ME) is also applied to reduce the complexity of ME.