View Synthesis Oriented Depth Map Coding Algorithm

A view synthesis-oriented depth map coding algorithm is proposed in this paper. Depth map is classified into inner motion regions, background subtracted with edges and edge regions by using edge detection of current depth map and the frame difference between corresponding color images. Then macroblocks in different regions are encoded with different RDO schemes so as to speed up the encoding process while keep the quality of reconstructed depth map. Experimental results show that the proposed method not only improves the encoding speed significantly, but also saves bitrate of depth map sequence while maintaining high quality of synthesized virtual view images.