Texture side information generation for distributed coding of video-plus-depth

We consider distributed video coding in a monoview video-plus-depth scenario, aiming at coding textures jointly with their corresponding depth stream. Distributed Video Coding (DVC) is a video coding paradigm in which the complexity is shifted from the encoder to the decoder. The Side Information (SI) generation is an important element of the decoder, since the SI is the estimation of the to-be-decoded frame.

Depth maps enable the calculation of the distance of an object from the camera. The motion between depth frames and their corresponding texture frames (luminance and chrominance components) is strongly correlated, so the additional depth information may be used to generate more accurate SI for the texture stream, increasing the efficiency of the system.

In this paper we propose various methods for accurate texture SI generation, comparing them with other state-of-the-art solutions. The proposed system achieves gains on the reference decoder up to 1.49 dB.