Performance analysis on multi-view coding with depth map distortion

Multi-view video plus depth (MVD) representations have been studied for 3-D TV and free-viewpoint video applications. In this paper, I quantitatively analyze the effect of depth map distortion on the performance of prediction-based multi-view coding. A new metric of this effect is proposed based on the rate-distortion theory, and successfully applied to both real image data and a theoretical model of view-synthesis prediction. This study reveals the types of images that are more/less sensitive to depth map distortion, which will be useful for designing/optimizing MVD coding schemes.