The temporal and inter-view correlation of multi-view videos (MVV)changes not only from sequence to sequence but also from frame to frame. Therefore

the fixed prediction structure of the Joint Multi-View Video Coding (JMVC)has difficulties coping with various characteristics of different MVV sequences. In this paper

a flexible prediction structure for multi-view video coding (FPS_MVC)is proposed based on the analysis of the hierarchical B picture prediction structure and the temporal correlation and inter-view correlation between the current frame and its references.Its temporal level (TL)and the temporal and inter-view correlation of the MVV sequence decide whether the inter-view prediction of the current encoded frame is adopted. Experimental results show that the proposed FPS_MVC outperforms Scalable Prediction Structure (SPS_MVC)on reducing computation complexity

improving random access (RA)ability

and decreasing the decode picture buffer (DPB)size by about 45%

28%

and 46% on average

while maintaining almost the same coding efficiency.