Wyner-Ziv Coding of Depth Maps Exploiting Color Motion Information

Distributed Video 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. Due to the high correlation of the motion in color and corresponding 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 rate-distortion 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 DISCOVER decoder, for GOP 2 and QCIF resolution. © (2013) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE).

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