A novel color compensation method for multi-view video coding (MVC) is proposed,which efficiently exploits the inter-view dependencies between views with the existence of color mismatch caused by the diversity of cameras. A color com-pensation model is developed in RGB channels and then extended to YCbCr channels for practical use. A modified inter-view reference picture is constructed based on the color compensation model,which is more similar to the coding picture than the original inter-view reference picture. Moreover,the color compensation factors can be derived in both encoder and decoder,therefore no additional data need to be transmitted to the decoder. The experimental results show that the proposed method im-proves the coding efficiency of MVC and maintains good subjective quality.