Utilisation of downsampling for arbitrary views in multi-view video coding

The effect of using downsampling for arbitrary views inside a multiview sequence on the multi-view coding (MVC) efficiency is explored. A bit rate adaptive approach is proposed to consider downsampling certain views prior to encoding with relevant downscaling ratios. The inter-view references, if any, are downsampled to the same resolution and the decoded view is upsampled back to the original resolution. The results over several multi-view test sequences imply that up to 0.9 dB gain or 20% reduction in bit rate can be achieved, reducing the computational complexity in the encoder significantly at the same time.