New video applications

such as 3D video and free viewpoint video

require efficient compression of multi-view video. In addition to temporal redundancy

exploiting the inter-view redundancy is crucial to improve the performance of multi-view video coding. In this paper

we present a novel method to construct the optimal inter-view prediction structure for multi-view video coding using simulated annealing. In the proposed model

the design of the prediction structure is converted to the arrangement of coding order. Then

a simulated annealing algorithm is employed to minimize the total cost for obtaining the best coding order. This method is applicable to arbitrary irregular camera arrangements. As experiment results reveal

the annealing process converges to satisfactory results rapidly and the generated optimal prediction structure outperforms the reference prediction structure of the joint multi-view video model (JMVM) by 0.1–0.8 dB PSNR gains.