Depth Video Inter Coding Based on Deep Frame Generation

Due to the fact that depth video contains large similar smooth content, the depth video frame could be selectively generated at the decoder side without being encoded and transmitted at the encoder side, so as to achieve a significant improvement in coding efficiency. This paper proposes a deep frame generation-based depth video inter coding method to efficiently compress the depth video. To reduce temporal redundancies of the depth video, the proposed method encodes depth key frames and directly generates the reconstruction of depth non-key frames. Moreover, a warping-based frame generation network with boundary awareness (Ba-WFGNet) is designed to generate high-quality depth non-key frames at the decoder side. In the Ba-WFGNet, the temporal correlations among depth frames are utilized to generate the coarse depth non-key frame in a warping manner. Then, considering the boundary quality of depth video has an important impact on view synthesis, a boundary-aware refinement module is designed to further refine the coarse depth non-key frame for high-quality boundaries. The proposed method is implemented into MIV, and experimental results verify that the proposed method achieves superior coding efficiency.