• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.6 no.4
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• pp.1128-1139
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• 2012

With the development of three-dimensional display and related technologies, depth video coding becomes a new topic and attracts great attention from industries and research institutes. Because (1) the depth video is not a sequence of images for final viewing by end users but an aid for rendering, and (2) depth video is simpler than the corresponding color video, fast algorithm for depth video is necessary and possible to reduce the computational burden of the encoder. This paper proposes a fast mode decision algorithm for depth video coding based on depth segmentation. Firstly, based on depth perception, the depth video is segmented into three regions: edge, foreground and background. Then, different mode candidates are searched to decide the encoding macroblock mode. Finally, encoding time, bit rate and video quality of virtual view of the proposed algorithm are tested. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm save encoding time ranging from 82.49% to 93.21% with negligible quality degradation of rendered virtual view image and bit rate increment.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.1730-1747
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• 2018

Multi-view video plus depth (MVD) is a mainstream format of 3D scene representation in free viewpoint video systems. The advanced 3D extension of the high efficiency video coding (3D-HEVC) standard introduces new prediction tools to improve the coding performance of depth video. However, the depth video in 3D-HEVC is time consuming. To reduce the complexity of the depth video inter coding, we propose a fast coding unit (CU) size and mode decision algorithm. First, an off-line trained Bayesian model is built which the feature vector contains the depth levels of the corresponding spatial, temporal, and inter-component (texture-depth) neighboring largest CUs (LCUs). Then, the model is used to predict the depth level of the current LCU, and terminate the CU recursive splitting process. Finally, the CU mode search process is early terminated by making use of the mode correlation of spatial, inter-component (texture-depth), and inter-view neighboring CUs. Compared to the 3D-HEVC reference software HTM-10.0, the proposed algorithm reduces the encoding time of depth video and the total encoding time by 65.03% and 41.04% on average, respectively, with negligible quality degradation of the synthesized virtual view.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.601-615
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• 2009

This paper proposes an efficient depth-map coding method for generating virtual-view images in 3D-Video. Virtual-view images can be generated by the view-interpolation based on the depth-map of the image. A conventional video coding method such as H.264 has been used. However, a conventional video coding method does not consider the image characteristics of the depth-map. Therefore, this paper proposes an adaptive depth-map coding method that can select between the H.264/AVC coding scheme and the proposed gray-coded bit plane-based coding scheme in a unit of block. This improves the coding efficiency of the depth-map data. Simulation results show that the proposed method, in comparison with the H.264/AVC coding scheme, improves the average BD-rate savings by 7.43% and the average BD-PSNR gains by 0.5dB. It also improves the subjective picture quality of synthesized virtual-view images using decoded depth-maps.

• Journal of Korea Multimedia Society
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• v.18 no.2
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• pp.149-157
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• 2015

The 3D-AVC standard aims at improving coding efficiency by applying new techniques for utilizing intra, inter and view predictions. 3D video scenes are rendered with existing texture video and additional depth map. The depth map comes at the expense of increased computational complexity of the encoding process. For real-time applications, reducing the complexity of 3D-AVC is very important. In this paper, we present a fast intra mode decision algorithm to reduce the complexity burden in the 3D video system. The proposed algorithm uses similarity between texture video and depth map. The best intra prediction mode of the depth map is similar to that of the corresponding texture video. The early decision algorithm can be made on the intra prediction of depth map coding by using the coded intra mode of texture video. Adaptive threshold for early termination is also proposed. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm saves the encoding time on average 29.7% without any significant loss in terms of the bit rate or PSNR value.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.14 no.7
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• pp.3018-3038
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• 2020

In the stereoscopic or multiview display, the depth video illustrates visual distances between objects and camera. To promote the computational efficiency of depth video encoder, we exploit the intra prediction of depth videos under Versatile Video Coding (VVC) and observe a diverse distribution of intra prediction modes with different coding unit sizes. We propose a hybrid scheme to further boost fast depth video coding. In the first stage, we adaptively predict the HADamard (HAD) costs of intra prediction modes and initialize a candidate list according to the HAD costs. Then, the candidate list is further improved by considering the probability distribution of candidate modes with different CU sizes. Finally, early termination of CU splitting is performed at each CU depth level based on the Bayesian theorem. Our proposed method is incorporated into VVC intra prediction for fast coding of depth videos. Experiments with 7 standard sequences and 4 Quantization parameters (Qps) validate the efficiency of our method.

• The Journal of Korean Institute of Communications and Information Sciences
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• v.34 no.10B
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• pp.1093-1103
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• 2009

In this paper, we propose a new depth map based distributed multi-view video coding algorithm through an efficient side information generation. A distributed video coding scheme corrects errors between an original image and side information generated at a decoder by using channel coding techniques. Therefore, the more accurate side information is generated, the better performance of distributed video coding scheme is achieved. In the proposed algorithm, a distributed video coding scheme is applied to multi-view video coding based on depth map. Side information is also generated from images of adjacent views through 3D warping by using a depth map and is also combined with MCTI(motion compensated temporal interpolation) which uses images on a temporal axis, and 3D warping. Experimental results show that side information generated by using the proposed algorithm has 0.97dB better average PSNR compared with using MCTI and 3D warping separated. In addition, 8.01% of average bit-rate has been decreased while the same PSNR in R-D curves is kept.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.1
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• pp.242-259
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• 2015

Three-dimensional video coding is one of the main challenges restricting the widespread applications of 3D video and free viewpoint video. In this paper, a novel fractal coding algorithm with motion-vector-field-based motion estimation for depth map sequence is proposed. We firstly add pre-search restriction to rule the improper domain blocks out of the matching search process so that the number of blocks involved in the search process can be restricted to a smaller size. Some improvements for motion estimation including initial search point prediction, threshold transition condition and early termination condition are made based on the feature of fractal coding. The motion-vector-field-based adaptive hexagon search algorithm on the basis of center-biased distribution characteristics of depth motion vector is proposed to accelerate the search. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm can reach optimum levels of quality and save the coding time. The PSNR of synthesized view is increased by 0.56 dB with 36.97% bit rate decrease on average compared with H.264 Full Search. And the depth encoding time is saved by up to 66.47%. Moreover, the proposed fractal depth map sequence codec outperforms the recent alternative codecs by improving the H.264/AVC, especially in much bitrate saving and encoding time reduction.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.21 no.6
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• pp.23-29
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• 2016

In this paper, we propose a method of depth video coding to find the closest sphere through the depth information when the spherical object is captured. We find the closest sphere to the captured spherical object using method of least squares in each block. Then, we estimate the depth value through the found sphere and encode the depth video through difference between the measured depth values and the estimated depth values. Also, we encode factors of the estimated sphere with encoded pixels within the block. The proposed method improves the coding efficiency up to 81% compared to the conventional DPCM method.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.14 no.5
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• pp.551-560
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• 2009

This paper proposes a method for efficient lossless depth map coding for MPEG 3D-Video coding. In general, the conventional video coding method such as H.264 has been used for depth map coding. However, the conventional video coding methods do not consider the image characteristics of the depth map. Therefore, as a lossless depth map coding method, this paper proposes a bit-plane based lossless depth mar coding method by using the MPEG-4 Part 2 shape coding scheme. Simulation results show that the proposed method achieves the compression ratios of 28.91:1. In intra-only coding, proposed method reduces the bitrate by 24.84% in comparison with the JPEG-LS scheme, by 39.35% in comparison with the JPEG-2000 scheme, by 30.30% in comparison with the H.264(CAVLC mode) scheme, and by 16.65% in comparison with the H.264(CABAC mode) scheme. In addition, in intra and inter coding the proposed method reduces the bitrate by 36.22% in comparison with the H.264(CAVLC mode) scheme, and by 23.71% in comparison with the 0.264(CABAC mode) scheme.

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