Joint texture and depth map video coding based on the scalable extension of H.264/AVC

• Published in: 2009 IEEE International Symposium on Circuits and Systems (ISCAS) pp. 2353 - 2356
• Main Authors: Siping Tao, Ying Chen, Hannuksela, M.M., Ye-Kui Wang, Gabbouj, M., Houqiang Li
• Format: Conference Proceeding
• Language: English
• Published: IEEE 01.05.2009
• Subjects: Automatic voltage control; Bandwidth; Decoding; Gain; Signal processing algorithms; Static VAr compensators; Transform coding; Video coding; Video compression; Video sharing
• ISBN: 1424438276; 9781424438273
• ISSN: 0271-4302
• DOI: 10.1109/ISCAS.2009.5118272

Depth-Image-Based Rendering (DIBR) is widely used for view synthesis in 3D video applications. Compared with traditional 2D video applications, both the texture video and its associated depth map are required for transmission in a communication system that supports DIBR. To efficiently utilize limited bandwidth, coding algorithms, e.g. the Advanced Video Coding (H.264/AVC) standard, can be adopted to compress the depth map using the 4:0:0 chroma sampling format. However, when the correlation between texture video and depth map is exploited, the compression efficiency may be improved compared with encoding them independently using H.264/AVC. A new encoder algorithm which employs Scalable Video Coding (SVC), the scalable extension of H.264/AVC, to compress the texture video and its associated depth map is proposed in this paper. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can provide up to 0.97 dB gain for the coded depth maps, compared with the simulcast scheme, wherein texture video and depth map are coded independently by H.264/AVC.