Motion information sharing mode for depth video coding

Multi-view plus depth (MVD) video is getting more popular as a new video format for 3DTV and Free viewpoint TV. By using multi-view and depth video, it is possible to efficiently render virtual views in decoder site. In this paper, we propose a motion information sharing mode for efficient depth video coding. Because the depth video is correlated with the color video especially in object boundary areas, the motion information of the color video can be shared with the depth video. Each ma-croblock selects a mode with minimum rate-distortion cost, and the proposed mode can be used as a candidate mode. Since the proposed mode is especially selected in object boundary areas, we can obtain more coding gain. Experimental results showed coding gain up to 0.8 dB, but the results depend on the quality of depth video.