Deep Virtual Reference Frame Generation For Multiview Video Coding

Multiview video has a large amount of data which brings great challenges to both the storage and transmission. Thus, it is essential to increase the compression efficiency of multiview video coding. In this paper, a deep virtual reference frame generation method is proposed to improve the performance of multiview video coding. Specifically, a parallax-guided generation network (PGG-Net) is designed to transform the parallax relation between different viewpoints and generate a high-quality virtual reference frame. In the network, a multilevel receptive field module is designed to enlarge the receptive field and extract the multi-scale deep features. After that, a parallax attention fusion module is used to transform the parallax and merge the features. The proposed method is integrated into the platform of 3D-HEVC and the generated virtual reference frame is inserted into the reference picture list as an additional reference. Experimental results show that the proposed method achieves 5.31% average BD-rate reduction compared to the 3D-HEVC.