Introduction

Abstract

Over the last years, the proliferation of digital devices associated to the ever growing bandwidth availability and speed of digital networks has increased the demand for digital multimedia contents. Most of the analogue multimedia systems have migrated to digital technology and the amount of digital video applications and services provided through the global Internet network has been increasing continuously. At home, digital technology has brought a more immersive viewing experience, namely through the use of Ultra High Definition (UHD) and three-dimensional (3D) video systems. Such a worldwide digital revolution has been enabled not only by the advances of digital devices and infrastructures, but also by the advent of the image and video compression standards. Compression algorithms aim to provide reduced bitrate representations of the multimedia contents with minimum quality losses. The High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is the most recent video compression standard, which provides an increased compression performance at the cost of a larger computational complexity. Typical image and video coding standards are based on three main components: prediction stage, residue coding and entropy coding. Over the last years, the prediction methods have evolved significantly, further reducing spatial and temporal redundancy in multimedia signals. This fact encourages the research of new improved prediction algorithms, aiming to provide new performance benchmarks for generic image and video compression, and responding to the most recent challenges on 3D video compression.