Improved depth-based motion vector prediction in 3D video coding

In H.264/AVC, motion vector prediction is only required to reduce temporal redundancy. In order to support inter-view motion vector prediction in multi-view video coding, the prediction process in H.264/AVC is extended in inter-view direction. In general, the temporal and inter-view motion vector prediction uses motion vectors of neighboring blocks around a current block. However, current 3D video coding deals with a multi-view video plus depth (MVD) format, so motion vectors in texture images can be predicted from the corresponding depth images. In this paper, we introduce an improved depth-based motion vector prediction method for the efficient 3D video coding. Simulation results show that the proposed method obtains higher coding efficiency than the conventional method.