The Effect of Depth Compression on Multiview Rendering Quality

This paper presents a comparative study on different techniques for depth-image compression and its implications on the quality of multiview video plus depth virtual view rendering. A novel coding algorithm for depth images that concentrates on their special characteristics, namely smooth regions delineated by sharp edges, is compared to H.264 intra-coding with depth- images. These two coding techniques are evaluated in the context of multiview video plus depth representations, where depth information is used to render virtual intermediate camera views of the scene. Therefore it is important to evaluate the influence of depth-image coding artifacts on the quality of rendered virtual views. The results of this evaluation show, that the coding algorithm specialized on the characteristics of depth images outperforms H.264 intra-coding, although its RD-performance is worse.