Estimation of end-to-end distortion of virtual view for error-resilient depth map coding

In this paper, we propose to estimate the end-to-end distortion of virtual view for error-resilient depth map coding by analyzing the view-rendering process. The end-to-end distortion is estimated according to the expectation of depth distortion. The expectation of depth distortion is estimated based on the error-propagated distortion from the reference frame, which is calculated recursively for each pixel by considering the source characteristics, channel condition and error concealment method. The error-propagated distortion in terms of each frame is updated after the frame is encoded, which is used for the subsequent frames. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm achieves substantial and consistent gains in comparison with the random intra updating method and the conventional rate-distortion method for error-resilient depth map coding.