An H.264-based video encoding scheme for 3D TV

This paper presents an H.264-based scheme for compressing 3D content captured by 3D depth range cameras. Existing MPEG-2 based schemes take advantage of the correlation between the 2D video sequence and its corresponding depth map sequence, and use the 2D motion vectors (MV) for the depth video sequence as well. This improves the speed of encoding the depth map sequence, but it results in an increase in the bitrate or a drop in the quality of the reconstructed 3D video. This is found to be due to the MVs of the 2D video sequence not being the best choice for encoding some parts of the depth map sequence containing sharp edges or corresponding to distant objects. To solve this problem, we propose an H.264-based method which re-estimates the MVs and re-selects the appropriate modes for these regions. Experimental results show that the proposed method enhances the quality of the encoded depth map sequence by an average of 1.77 dB. Finding the MVs of the sharp edge-included regions of the depth map sequence amounts to 30.64% of the computational effort needed to calculate MVs for the whole depth map sequence.