A panoramic 3D video coding with directional depth aided inpainting

The success of 3D and free-viewpoint television largely depends on the efficient representation and compression of 3D video in addition to viable rendering methods. This paper presents a novel 3D video coding technique based on the creation of a panorama view to compact the information of a stereoscopic pair. The panorama view represents the information that would be visible to a virtual camera with a larger field of view embracing all the available views. The information in the panorama view is then used to estimate any intermediate view using depth image based rendering. Furthermore, to fill the disocclusions in the reconstructed view a directional depth aided fast marching inpainting technique is presented. The panorama view and corresponding depth map are amenable to standard video compression. In this paper we show that using the novel HEVC standard the proposed 3D video format can be compressed very efficiently.