Joint multiview video plus depth coding

Multiview video plus depth (MVD), where per-pixel depth map sequences are associated with multiview texture video, is a promising approach for three-dimensional (3D) video solutions requiring view synthesis. The Multiview Video Coding (MVC) standard has been typically used to compress the MVD representation, resulting into the multiview texture video and the multiview depth video being in two separate MVC bitstreams. Such a coding scheme does not, however, utilize the similarities of the motion information of the multiview texture video and the multiview depth video. The joint multiview video plus depth coding (JMVDC) scheme presented in this paper uses inter-view prediction similarly to MVC as well as the inter-layer motion prediction tool of the Scalable Video Coding (SVC) standard to exploit the correlation of the motion in the texture and depth video sequences. The simulation results show that the JMVDC method achieves about 10 to 20% saving in depth bitrate compared with conventional MVC-based coding of MVD representations.