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.