Plane segmentation based intra prediction for depth map coding

This paper presents an efficient intra prediction scheme for depth map coding in multi-view plus depth (MVD) system. As compared to the conventional intra prediction algorithm, the proposed method segments the current block into k regions, and applies different prediction scheme for each segmented region, which results in higher prediction accuracy by avoiding wrong estimation across different regions. Moreover, we also provide the efficient lossless coding scheme for region segmentation information based on unique depth characteristics, by which the proposed scheme is competitive w.r.t. R-D cost. The simulation results show the superior performance of the proposed scheme comparing to the H.264/AVC intra prediction and other edge-based intra scheme for depth map.