A joint coding method of video plus depth based on H.264

This paper presents a study on joint coding of video plus depth utilizing the correlation between video and depth. The Rate Distortion Optimization (RDO) technique has been employed in H.264 for intra prediction mode selection to achieve better coding efficiency. The proposed method considers the color video and depth video to compress jointly, which is based on the RDO mode decision algorithm and the same prediction modes of video and depth. Due to having the similar edge feature of color video and depth video, intra prediction mode of most 16×16 macroblocks of color video and its corresponding depth video are the same. For the inter prediction of depth video, the optimal prediction mode is 16×16 mode. These characteristics are used to jointly encode color video and depth video to reduce the number of encoding bit. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can decrease the number of encoding bit.