Efficient Synthesis-Based Depth Map Coding in AVC-Compatible 3D Video Coding

A multiview video plus depth format was introduced to support 3D depth perception and arbitrary view generation. To achieve high coding performance in AVC-compatible 3D video coding (3D-AVC), we herein propose an efficient depth map coding method that includes synthesis-based depth residual coding and filtering. The synthesis-based depth residual coding method adaptively encodes a residual by predicting synthesis distortion from spatial complexity of the corresponding texture, in a nonnormative way. In order to compensate for possible error from the proposed coding method, synthesis-based depth filtering is additionally conducted on the reconstructed depth map. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method reduces the bit rates by 4.4% and 4.8%, compared with the original method for the decoded and synthesized PSNRs, respectively, while satisfying the compatibility with the current 3D-AVC.

I. Introduction

Recent developments of multiview video technologies have enabled the next generation broadcasting service for 3D video [1]. However, 3D video service requires a large transmission bandwidth and storage space for multiview data. One promising solution to reduce the amount of data is to use the multiview video plus depth (MVD) format as the 3D video format. The MVD format consists of a texture image and its corresponding depth map. Fig. 1 shows the MVD format of a Newspaper sequence. The depth map represents the distance between an object and a camera, which is necessary for rendering the virtual views generated by a depth image-based rendering technique [2]. Fig. 1.

Example of MVD format including (a) texture and (b) depth images.