• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.8 no.9
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• pp.3146-3158
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• 2014

Efficient depth map coding is very crucial to the multi-view plus depth (MVD) format of 3-D video representation, as the quality of the synthesized virtual views highly depends on the accuracy of the depth map. Depth map contains smooth area within an object but distinct boundary, and these boundary areas affect the visual quality of synthesized views significantly. In this paper, we characterize the depth map by an auto-covariance analysis to show the locally anisotropic features of depth map. According to the characterization analysis, we propose an efficient depth map coding scheme, in which the directional discrete cosine transforms (DDCT) is adopted to substitute the conventional 2-D DCT to preserve the boundary information and thereby increase the quality of synthesized view. Experimental results show that the proposed scheme achieves better performance than that of conventional DCT with respect to the bitrate savings and rendering quality.

• 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).

• ETRI Journal
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• v.38 no.6
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• pp.1114-1123
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• 2016

Multi-view video plus depth (MVD) has been widely used owing to its effectiveness in three-dimensional data representation. Using MVD, color videos with only a limited number of real viewpoints are compressed and transmitted along with captured or estimated depth videos. Because the synthesized views are generated from decoded real views, their original reference views do not exist at either the transmitter or receiver. Therefore, it is challenging to define an efficient metric to evaluate the quality of synthesized images. We propose a novel metric-the reduced-reference quality metric. First, the effects of depth distortion on the quality of synthesized images are analyzed. We then employ the high correlation between the local depth distortions and local color characteristics of the decoded depth and color images, respectively, to achieve an efficient depth quality metric for each real view. Finally, the objective quality metric of the synthesized views is obtained by combining all the depth quality metrics obtained from the decoded real views. The experimental results show that the proposed quality metric correlates very well with full reference image and video quality metrics.

• Journal of the Korea Institute of Information and Communication Engineering
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• v.20 no.2
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• pp.375-384
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• 2016

In this paper, when stereo image, satellite view and corresponding depth maps were used as the input data, we propose a new method that convert these data to data format suitable for compressing, and then by using these format, intermediate view is synthesized. In the transmitter depth maps are merged to a global depth map and satellite view are converted to residual image corresponding hole region as out of frame area and occlusion region. And these images subsampled to reduce a mount of data and stereo image of main view are encoded by HEVC codec and transmitted. In the receiver intermediate views between stereo image and between stereo image and bit-rate are synthesized using decoded global depth map, residual images and stereo image. Through experiments, we confirm good quality of intermediate views synthesized by proposed format subjectively and objectively in comparison to intermediate views synthesized by MVD format versus total bit-rate.

• 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.