Impact of depth map spatial resolution on 3D video quality and depth perception

Despite the burgeoning advances in 3D video technologies, 3D video adaptation is still in its infancy. 3D video has a multidimensional nature. To support the growth of 3D adaptation technologies, key factors that characterise this nature should be thoroughly studied. Spatial resolution is one of the important factors characterising this nature. Thus, particularly the effect of different spatial resolutions of depth maps on video quality and depth perception should be investigated. Similarly, the influence of the content related factors on the perception of different spatial resolutions of the depth maps should also be investigated. Therefore, evaluation studies are conducted using spatially scaled depth maps encoded at different bit rates and their original colour texture counterparts. The depth maps utilised in the evaluations present different spatial and motion complexity characteristics. The results demonstrate that when the spatial resolutions of the depth maps increase, both the video quality and depth perception improve. The amount of improvement is highly correlated with the structural and motion complexity characteristics of the depth maps.