Low Complexity Adaptive View Synthesis Optimization in HEVC Based 3D Video Coding

In this correspondence, we explore a low-complexity adaptive view synthesis optimization (VSO) scheme in the upcoming high-efficiency video coding (HEVC)-based 3-D video coding standard. We first devise a novel zero-synthesized view difference (ZSVD) model which jointly accounts for the distortion of the synthesized view induced by the compound impact of depth-disparity mapping, texture adaptation, and occlusion in the view synthesis process. This model can efficiently estimate the maximum allowable depth distortion in synthesizing a virtual view without introducing any geometry distortion. Then, an adaptive ZSVD-aware VSO scheme is proposed by incorporating the ZSVD model into the rate-distortion optimization process, which is developed by pruning the conventional view synthesis algorithm. Extensive experimental results confirm that the proposed model is capable of accurately predicting the zero distortion of the synthesized view and exhibit that the proposed ZSVD-aware VSO scheme can remarkably reduce the coding computational complexity with negligible performance loss.