Wyner-Ziv coding of depth maps exploiting color motion information

Abstract

Distributed coding of multi-view data and depth maps is an interesting and challenging research field, whose interest is growing thanks to the recent advances in depth estimation and the development of affordable devices able to acquire depth information. In applications like video surveillance and object tracking, the availability of depth data can be beneficial and allow for more accurate processing. In these scenarios, the encoding complexity is typically limited and therefore distributed coding approaches are desirable. In this paper a novel algorithm for distributed compression of depth maps exploiting corresponding color information is proposed. Thanks to the high correlation of the motion in color and depth videos, motion information from the decoded color signal can effectively be exploited to generate accurate side information for the depth signal, allowing for higher ratedistortion performance without increasing the delay at the decoder side. The proposed scheme has been evaluated against state-of-the-art distributed video coding techniques applied on depth data. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can provide PSNR improvement between 2.18 dB and 3.40 dB on depth data compared to the reference decoder.

Distributed multi-hypothesis coding of depth maps using texture motion information and optical flow

“…A preliminary study of the aforementioned problem has been performed in [13] but only the block-based method was presented and no fusion technique was proposed.…”

A distributed video coding system for multi view video plus depth

“…At the best of our knowledge, this information has been rarely used for the side information generation in DVC applied to multiview video plus depth. Some works [9][10][11] about DVC applied to multiview video plus depth have only highlighted the advantage of sharing the motion information between texture and depth. In a previous work [12], DVC is applied to MVD in order to assure continuity of the playback in the context of the interactive multiview video streaming paradigm.…”