Histogram-offset-based color correction for multi-view video coding

In multi-view video system, variations of different camera setups (for example, camera positions, lighting conditions and camera characteristics) might cause discrepancies on the luminance and chrominance components of different views. From the viewpoint of source compression, this will lead to inaccurate inter-view prediction and lower coding efficiency. In this paper, a histogram-offset-based color correction method is developed for benefitting multi-view video coding. First, disparity estimation is conducted on the rank-transformed domain to identify the maximum matching regions between the reference view and the target view. Within the identified matching regions, the histograms of the reference view and the target view are then calculated, respectively. By using an iterative thresholding approach, a histogram offset is generated and exploited to correct the target view. Experimental results have shown that the proposed color correction method outperforms the histogram matching method on the improvement of coding efficiency.