Depth-based multiview distributed video coding

Multiview distributed video coding (DVC) has gained much attention in the last few years because of its potential in avoiding communication between cameras without decreasing the coding performance. However, the current results are not matching the expectations mainly due to the fact that some theoretical assumptions are not satisfied in the current implementations. For example, in distributed source coding the encoder must know the correlation between the sources, which cannot be achieved in the traditional DVC systems without having a communication between the cameras. In this work, we propose a novel multiview distributed video coding scheme in which the depth maps are used to estimate the way two views are correlated with no exchanges between the cameras. Only their relative positions are known. We design the complete scheme and further propose a rate allocation algorithm to efficiently share the bit budget between the different components of our scheme. Then, a rate allocation algorithm for depth maps is proposed in order to maximize the quality of synthesized virtual views. We show, through detailed experiments, that our scheme significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art DVC system.