Coding order decision of B frames for rate-distortion performance improvement in single-view video and multiview video coding

The coding gain that can be achieved by improving the coding order of B frames in the H.264/AVC standard is investigated in this work. We first represent the coding order of B frames and their reference frames with a binary tree. We then formulate a recursive equation to find out the binary tree that provides a suboptimal, but very efficient, coding order. The recursive equation is efficiently solved using a dynamic programming method. Furthermore, we extend the coding order improvement technique to the case of multiview video sequences, in which the quadtree representation is used instead of the binary tree representation. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm provides significantly better R-D performance than conventional prediction structures.