General Synthesized View Distortion Estimation for Depth Map Compression of FTV

The state-of-the-art depth map coding distortion measurement in view synthesis optimization (VSO) of 3D-HEVC reference software applies only for 1D parallel camera arrangement and requires explicit specification of virtual camera position(s) to be optimized. This paper presents a general joint distortion metric (GJDM) of synthesized views for depth map coding of FTV. The proposed metric estimates the expected distortion of all potential synthesized views generated by the depth map regardless of the arrangement of virtual cameras, thus supports arbitrary camera setups and various applications, e.g., free navigation. Furthermore, the proposed distortion metric is rendering-free and prone to parallelization. In a word, the proposed metric supports more general camera arrangement and achieves 21% coding gain and 6% encoding time reduction in average in free navigation test sequences.