Edge-aware wedgelet estimation for depth maps compression

Abstract

In recent years, Multi-view Video plus Depth (MVD) compression has received much attention thanks to its relevance to free viewpoint applications needs. An efficient compression, that causes the least distortion without excessive rate and complexity increase, becomes a must particularly for depth maps. These latter can be compressed efficiently by the 3D extension of High Efficiency Video Coding (3D-HEVC), which has explored wedgelets. Such functions lead to significant Rate-Distortion tradeoffs. However, they require a very large computational complexity involved by the exhaustive search used for the estimation of the wedgelet subdivision line. In this paper, we propose a rapid localization of this latter using an edge detection approach. The experimental results show that the proposed approach allows an important gain in terms of encoding delay, while providing better depth maps and synthesized views quality compared to the exhaustive search approach.