Wyner-Ziv coding for depth maps in multiview video-plus-depth

Three dimensional digital video services are gathering a lot of attention in recent years, thanks to the introduction of new and efficient acquisition and rendering devices. In particular, 3D video is often represented by a single view and a so called depth map, which gives information about the distance between the point of view and the objects. This representation can be extended to multiple views, each with its own depth map. Efficient compression of this kind of data is of course a very important topic in sight of a massive deployment of services such as 3D-TV and FTV (free viewpoint TV). In this paper we consider the application of distributed coding techniques to the coding of depth maps, in order to reduce the complexity of single view or multi view encoders and to enhance interactive multiview video streaming. We start from state-of-the-art distributed video coding techniques and we improve them by using high order motion interpolation and by exploiting texture motion information to encode the depth maps. The experiments reported here show that the proposed method achieves a rate reduction up to 11.06% compared to state-of-the-art distributed video coding technique. © 2011 IEEE.