A novel upsampling scheme for depth map compression in 3DTV system

In 3D video transmission, the depth map is normally compressed by resolution reduction to save bandwidth. The lost information in resolution reduction is recovered by an appropriate upsampling algorithm in decoding step. Most previous work considers the depth upsampling problem as common 2D map upsampling problem and do not take the intrinsic property of depth map into consideration. In this paper, we propose a novel two-step depth map upsampling scheme to address the problem on 3D videos. The first step utilizes the full resolution 2D color map to direct the reconstruction of a more accurate full resolution depth map. And the second step further flats the reconstructed depth map to ensure its local uniformity. Test results show that the proposed novel upsam-pling scheme achieves up to 2dB coding gains for the rendering of free-viewpoint video, and improves its perceptual quality significantly.