(An) efficient texture and depth coding method for lossless synthesis in 3D video coding

Abstract

Multi-view video plus depth (MVD) format, which includes a texture image and its corresponding depth map, has been introduced to represent 3D scenes. In addition to texture coding, depth coding is considered for arbitrary view synthesis in 3D application. We propose an efficient texture and depth coding method using three layers for lossless synthesis in 3D video coding. The proposed method performs lossy and lossless texture coding in the first and second layers, respectively. A quantization parameter (QP) in the first lossy coding layer is adaptively determined for each block, based on a relationship between the first and second layers. In the third layer, lossy depth coding is performed by employing a synthesis-based depth coding method and a texture-based depth prediction mode. The synthesis-based depth coding method adopts the lossy coding but guarantees zero synthesis distortion, and the texture-based depth prediction is introduced to simplify intra prediction modes. Experiment results demonstrate that the proposed method obtains higher coding performance than conventional lossless coding methods.