A novel trilateral filter technique for depth map processing in 3D video coding

Free viewpoint video communication is one of the most interesting schemes for an immersive 3D experience, but it requires multiple views of the same scene. In order to limit the number of transmitted views, depth representations of the scene are used for depth image-based rendering, to generate virtual views at the receiver. Nevertheless, the video-plus-depth approach presents an additional burden of data that may be attenuated by coding down-sampled depth maps. This is able to achieve significant bit rate savings, specially for higher compression ratios, at the expense of some degradation on the quality of the decoded depth maps. However, as these techniques heavily rely on the quality of the depth maps, post-processing methods, such as filtering, are used to restore its quality. In this work we propose a new depth map processing method that is able to improve the image rendering quality. Experimental results show that a better rendering quality is achieved, when compared to other commonly used filters.