A Fast and Efficient Multi-View Depth Image Coding Method Based on Temporal and Inter-View Correlations of Texture Images

Multi-view video plus depth format, which includes texture and depth images, has been recently introduced as a video representation to support depth perception of scenes and efficient view generation at arbitrary positions. Especially, a depth image has been one of the significantly important issues for successful services of 3-D video applications. In this paper, we introduce a fast and efficient multi-view depth image coding method using the texture images. The proposed method determines to skip some blocks of the depth image at the early stage without a normal encoding process including rate-distortion optimization, based on temporal and inter-view correlations between the previously encoded texture images. The skipped blocks are predicted from the neighboring depth images. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method not only achieves the drastically high coding performance but also reduces the complexity of the encoder.