Encoder-friendly Global-view-depth for Free Viewpoint Video

The multi-view video plus depth (MVD) format has been used to provide a large amount of views for immersive viewing experience in various applications such as virtual reality systems. Meanwhile, the global view and depth (GVD) format is also considered as an alternative to MVD. It reduces the amount of valid data of frames based on photo consistency in the light field. However, the applicability of GVD as an input of the standard video compression has been rarely studied. In this paper, three schemes are proposed where the spatial and temporal correlation in frames are seriously taken to apply the GVD to the standard video encoder successfully. Processes for GVD construction and video coding are tightly coupled each other. This improves the coding efficiency as well as encoding speed significantly in the GVD-input video encoder.