Panorama View With Spatiotemporal Occlusion Compensation for 3D Video Coding

The future of novel 3D display technologies largely depends on the design of efficient techniques for 3D video representation and coding. Recently, multiple view plus depth video formats have attracted many research efforts since they enable intermediate view estimation and permit to efficiently represent and compress 3D video sequences. In this paper, we present spatiotemporal occlusion compensation with panorama view (STOP), a novel 3D video coding technique based on the creation of a panorama view and occlusion coding in terms of spatiotemporal offsets. The panorama picture represents the most of the visual information acquired from multiple views using a single virtual view, characterized by a larger field of view. Encoding the panorama video with state-of-the-art HECV and representing occlusions with simple spatiotemporal ancillary information STOP achieves high-compression ratio and good visual quality with competitive results with respect to competing techniques. Moreover, STOP enables free viewpoint 3D TV applications whilst allowing legacy display to get a bidimensional service using a standard video codec and simple cropping operations.