Efficient Compression of Multi-View Depth Data Based on MVC

This paper presents a method for efficient compression of multi-view depth data based on our multi-view video coding approach for color data. The idea is to exploit statistical dependencies from both temporal and inter-view reference pictures for prediction. For this purpose a multi-view video data set including color and depth information is analyzed in terms of coding efficiency. Coding experiments using prediction structures with and without inter-view reference pictures are performed with multi-view depth data and compared to multi-view video coding. The results show that additionally applying inter-view prediction to temporal prediction with hierarchical B pictures improves coding efficiency for depth as well as color, reporting average gains in PSNR-Y of 0.5 dB for depth and 0.3 dB for color.