Flexible Coding Order for 3D video extension of H.265/HEVC

This paper presents a novel Multi-View Video plus Depth (MVD) data coding configuration for the 3D video extension of the High Efficiency Video Coding standard (3D-HEVC). To improve compression efficiency of dependent views, 3D-HEVC utilizes disparity information which is derived from the motion information of the neighboring blocks. However, in the case of MVD data coding, disparity information can be derived directly from the depth data. To utilize this approach, we propose to code the depth maps of the dependent views before their associated texture pictures. Consequently, disparity can be derived from coded depth and can be utilized for coding of texture data. The proposed method improves the compression performance of 3D-HEVC by 0.6% in delta bit rate on average. In addition to this, coded depth maps can be used for Backward View Synthesis Prediction (B-VSP) to further reduce bitrate of dependent texture views. Not only the rate distortion performance is improved, but also the proposed configuration reduces the complexity of decoding by over 8%.