Key view selection in distributed multiview coding

Multiview image and video systems with large number of views lead to new problems in data representation, transmission and user interaction. In order to reduce the data volumes, most distributed multiview coding schemes exploit the inter-view redundancies at the decoder side, using view synthesis from key views. In the situation where many views are considered, the two following questions become fundamental: i) how many key views have to be chosen for keeping a good reconstruction quality with reasonable coding cost? ii) where to place them optimally in the multiview sequences? We propose in this paper an algorithm for selecting the key views in a distributed multiview coding scheme. Based on a novel metric for the correlation between the views, we formulate an optimization problem for the positioning of the key views such that both the distortion of the reconstruction and the coding rate cost are effectively minimized. We then propose a new optimization strategy based on shortest path algorithm that permits to determine both the optimal number of key views and their positions in the image set. We experimentally validate our solution in a practical distributed multiview coding system and we show that considering the 3D scene geometry in the key view positioning brings significant rate-distortion improvements compared to distance-based key view selection as it is commonly done in the literature.