Depth Coding Using a Boundary Reconstruction Filter for 3-D Video Systems

A depth image is 3-D information used for virtual view synthesis in 3-D video system. In depth coding, the object boundaries are hard to compress and severely affect the rendering quality since they are sensitive to coding errors. In this paper, we propose a depth boundary reconstruction filter and utilize it as an in-loop filter to code the depth video. The proposed depth boundary reconstruction filter is designed considering occurrence frequency, similarity, and closeness of pixels. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed depth boundary reconstruction filter is useful for efficient depth coding as well as high-quality 3-D rendering.