Joint intra coding of video and depth maps

The paper describes a technique for compression of a stereoscopic video pair together with the corresponding two depth maps. The proposed encoder produces a joint bit-stream for two viewpoint video sequences and two depth maps. Thus the headers with the control information is shared for all 4 video items. Moreover mutual correlation between these items is exploited by use of the multiview compression tools from MPEG-4 AVC/H.264 coding technology. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated and compared to the performance of independent coding of video and depth maps.