A quadratic distortion criterion with Lagrangian multiplier for depth map coding

Different with traditional videos, three dimensional video (3DV) contains multiview videos as well as their corresponding depth maps. Depth maps are not used for viewing, but for rendering virtual views. Therefore, the quality of virtual view should be taken into account during depth compression. A modified distortion model is proposed to be used as the distortion criterion during the compression of depth maps so as to improve the coding efficiency of depth maps. Based on the model, a corresponding Lagrangian Multiplier for depth map coding is also proposed. Experimental results demonstrate that a maximum 0.458dB and an average 0.272dB BD PSNR can be achieved when comparing the proposed method with H.264/AVC.