• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
• /
• v.15 no.5
• /
• pp.1155-1163
• /
• 2011

In this paper, we propose a new pre-processing algorithm applied to depth map to improve the coding efficiency. Now, 3DV/FTV group in the MPEG is working for standard of 3DVC(3D video coding), but compression method for depth map images are not confirmed yet. In the proposed algorithm, after dividing the histogram distribution of a given depth map by EM clustering method based on GMM, we classify the depth map into several layered images. Then, we apply different mean shift filter to each classified image according to the existence of background or foreground in it. In other words, we try to maximize the coding efficiency while keeping the boundary of each object and taking average operation toward inner field of the boundary. The experiments are performed with many test images and the results show that the proposed algorithm achieves bits reduction of 19% ~ 20% and computation time is also reduced.

• Proceedings of the Korean Society of Broadcast Engineers Conference
• /
• 2015.07a
• /
• pp.452-454
• /
• 2015

This paper provides the coding performance comparisons of depth map resolution in 3D video system. In multiview plus depth map system, depth map is used for synthesis view rendering, and affects to synthesis views quality. In the paper, we show the experimental results as depth map resolution in 3D video system, and show performance variation as dilation filter.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
• /
• v.21 no.2
• /
• pp.237-251
• /
• 2016

The conventional 3D-HEVC uses the depth data of the other view instead of that of the current view because the texture data has to be encoded before the corresponding depth data of the current view has been encoded, where the depth data of the other view is used as the predicted depth for the current view. Whereas the conventional 3D-HEVC has no other candidate for the predicted depth information except for that of the other view, the scalable 3D-HEVC utilizes the depth data of the lower spatial layer whose view ID is equal to that of the current picture. The depth data of the lower spatial layer is up-scaled to the resolution of the current picture, and then the enlarged depth data is used as the predicted depth information. Because the quality of the enlarged depth is much higher than that of the depth of the other view, the proposed scheme increases the coding efficiency of the scalable 3D-HEVC codec. Computer simulation results show that the scalable 3D-HEVC is useful and the proposed scheme to use the enlarged depth data for the current picture provides the significant coding gain.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.9 no.10
• /
• pp.4108-4125
• /
• 2015

This paper presents a scalable coding method for depth images by considering the quality of synthesized images in virtual views. First, we design a new edge detection algorithm that is based on calculating the depth difference between two neighboring pixels within the depth map. By choosing different thresholds, this algorithm generates a scalable bit stream that puts larger depth differences in front, followed by smaller depth differences. A scalable scheme is also designed for coding depth pixels through a layered sampling structure. At the receiver side, the full-resolution depth image is reconstructed from the received bits by solving a partial-differential-equation (PDE). Experimental results show that the proposed method improves the rate-distortion performance of synthesized images at virtual views and achieves better visual quality.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
• /
• v.10 no.6
• /
• pp.2730-2747
• /
• 2016

Due to the limitation of the bandwidth resource and capture resolution of depth cameras, low resolution depth maps should be up-sampled to high resolution so that they can correspond to their texture images. In this paper, a novel depth map up-sampling algorithm is proposed by exploiting the fractal internal self-referential feature. Fractal parameters which are extracted from a depth map, describe the internal self-referential feature of the depth map, do not introduce inherent scale and just retain the relational information of the depth map, i.e., fractal transforms provide a resolution-independent description for depth maps and could up-sample depth maps to an arbitrary high resolution. Then, an enhancement method is also proposed to further improve the performance of the up-sampled depth map. The experimental results demonstrate that better quality of synthesized views is achieved both on objective and subjective performance. Most important of all, arbitrary resolution depth maps can be obtained with the aid of the proposed scheme.

• Journal of the Institute of Electronics Engineers of Korea SP
• /
• v.49 no.2
• /
• pp.83-93
• /
• 2012

This paper proposes a method to efficiently encode multi-view color videos and depth maps. The proposed coding method for multi-view color videos and depth maps can improve the coding efficiency by additional inter-view prediction, as well as inter-frame prediction. By means of the proposed method, we achieved the coding gain of approximately 55% for 2-view color videos and approximately 12% for 2-view depth maps. For 3-view case, we found that the proposed system yields 54% of coding gain from outer view color videos and 56% of coding gain from center view color videos, respectively. Moreover, for 3-view depth map case, approximately 11% of coding gain from outer view and 13% of coding gain from center view are obtained with the proposed coder, respectively.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
• /
• v.20 no.4
• /
• pp.545-556
• /
• 2015

A HEVC-compatible 3D video coding method (3D-HEVC) has been recently developed as an extension of the high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard. In order to efficiently deal with the multi-view video plus depth (MVD) format, 3D-HEVC exploits an inter-component prediction which allows the prediction between texture and depth map images in addition to a temporal prediction used in the conventional single layer video coding such as H.264/AVC and HEVC. The performance of the inter-component prediction is normally affected by the accuracy of the disparity vector, and thus it is important to have an accurate disparity vector used for the inter-component prediction. This paper, therefore, introduces a disparity derivation method and inter-component algorithms using the disparity vector for the efficient 3D video coding. Simulation results show that the 3D-HEVC provides higher coding performance compared with the simulcast approach using HEVC and the simple multi-view extension (MH-HEVC).

• Smart Media Journal
• /
• v.2 no.2
• /
• pp.28-32
• /
• 2013

In this paper, we present a method to reduce complexity of depth modeling modes (DMM) that are used in the current 3D-HEVC standardization. DMM adds four modes to the existing HEVC intra prediction modes for accurate object edge representation in the depth map. Especially, Mode 3 requires distortion calculation of numerous pre-defined wedgelets, inducing high complexity. The proposed method employs absolute differences of neighboring pixels in the sides of the reference block to find high intensity changing positions. Based on such positions, the number of wedgelet candidates is reduced to six and distortion calculation is skipped for irrelevant wedgelets. Experimental results show complexity reduction by 3.1% on average, while maintaining similar coding performance.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
• /
• v.17 no.4
• /
• pp.565-571
• /
• 2012

During depth data acquisition and transmission, the quality of depth maps is usually degraded by physical noise and coding error. In this paper, a new joint bilateral filter based on the common distance transform is presented to enhance the low-quality depth map. The proposed method determines the amount of exploitable color data according to distance transform values of depth and color pixels. Consequently, the proposed filter minimizes noise in the depth map while suppressing visual artifacts of joint bilateral filtering. Experimental results show that our method outperforms other conventional methods in terms of noise reduction and visual artifact suppression.

• Journal of Electrical Engineering and Technology
• /
• v.9 no.5
• /
• pp.1762-1773
• /
• 2014

In this paper, a distributed image coding scheme for multi-view video through an efficient generation of side information is proposed. A distributed video coding technique corrects the errors in the side information, which is generated with the original image, by using the channel coding technique at the decoder. Therefore, the more correct the generated side information is, the better the performance of distributed video coding. The proposed technique is to apply the distributed video coding schemes to the image coding for multi-view video. It generates side information by selectively and efficiently using both 3-dimensional warping based on the depth map with spatially adjacent frames and motion-compensated temporal interpolation with temporally adjacent frames. In this scheme the difference between the adjacent frames, the sizes of the motion vectors for the adjacent blocks, and the edge information are used as the selection criteria. From the experiments, it was observed that the quality of the side information generated by the proposed technique was improved by the average peak signal-to-noise ratio of 0.97dB than the one by motion-compensated temporal interpolation or 3-dimensional warping. The result from analyzing the rate-distortion curves revealed that the proposed scheme could reduce the bit-rate by 8.01% on average at the same peak signal-to-noise ratio value, compared to previous work.