Texture-Aware Depth Prediction in 3D Video Coding

3D video has raised great interest in the last decade and currently a new 3D video coding standard, known as 3D video coding extension of High Efficiency Video Coding (3D-HEVC), has been developed. The standard investigates the coding of multiview video plus depth, which consists of texture videos and depth videos of multiple views. Depth video, as a description of geometry information of a scene, is generally composed of large flat regions separated by sharp edges. The conventional video coding may fail to generate an accurate prediction for units with sharp edges due to its block-based prediction which cannot compensate (minor) boundary changes well. In order to attack the problem, a new texture-aware depth inter-prediction method is proposed, which incorporates pixel-oriented weighting in the bi-prediction process by exploiting motion and structure similarities between texture and depth videos. Furthermore, such pixel-oriented weighting scheme can be extended to the uni-prediction process by considering more prediction blocks with small motion vector displacements. Experimental results demonstrate that the adapted 3D-HEVC codec with the proposed method can achieve better rate-distortion performance compared to the original 3D-HEVC standard codec.