• 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 Broadcast Engineering
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• v.16 no.2
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• pp.274-292
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• 2011

This paper proposes an efficient coding method of the depth-map which is different from the natural images. The depth-map are so smooth in both inner parts of the objects and background, but it has sharp edges on the object-boundaries like a cliff. In addition, when a depth-map block is decomposed into bit planes, the characteristic of perfect matching or inverted matching between bit planes often occurs on the object-boundaries. Therefore, the proposed depth-map coding scheme is designed to have the bit-plane unit coding method using the adaptive XOR method for efficiently coding the depth-map images on the object-boundary areas, as well as the conventional DCT-based coding scheme (for example, H.264/AVC) for efficiently coding the inside area images of the objects or the background depth-map images. The experimental results show that the proposed algorithm improves the average bit-rate savings as 11.8 % ~ 20.8% and the average PSNR (Peak Signal-to-Noise Ratio) gains as 0.9 dB ~ 1.5 dB in comparison with the H.264/AVC coding scheme. And the proposed algorithm improves the average bit-rate savings as 7.7 % ~ 12.2 % and the average PSNR gains as 0.5 dB ~ 0.8 dB in comparison with the adaptive block-based depth-map coding scheme. It can be confirmed that the proposed method improves the subjective quality of synthesized image using the decoded depth-map in comparison with the H.264/AVC coding scheme. And the subjective quality of the proposed method was similar to the subjective quality of the adaptive block-based depth-map coding scheme.

• Journal of Korea Society of Industrial Information Systems
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• v.22 no.3
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• pp.39-47
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• 2017

The Depth Picture can be Encoded by the Plane Coding Mode that is the Method for Coding Mode by Considering a Part of the Picture as the Plane. In this Paper, we Propose the Method of Determining the Variable-sized Block for Variable Block Coding in the Plane Coding Mode for the Depth Picture. The Depth Picture Can be Encoded in the Plane Coding Through Estimating the Plane Which is Close to Pixels in the Block Using Depth Information. The Variable-sized Block Coding in the Plane Coding can be Applied as Follows. It Calculates the Prediction Error between Predicted Depths by the Plane Estimation and the Measured Depths. If Prediction Error is Below the Threshold, the Block is Encoded by Current Size. Otherwise, it Divides the Block and Repeats Above. If the Block is Divided Below the Minimum Size, the Block is not Encoded by the Plane Coding Mode. The Result of the Simulation of the Proposed Method Shows that the Number of Encoded Block is Reduced to 19% as Compared with the Method Using the Fixed-sized Block in the Depth Picture Composed of one Plane.

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

• 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 Broadcast Engineering
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• v.15 no.2
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• pp.232-235
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• 2010

This paper proposes an efficient depth-map coding method. The adaptive block-based depth-map coding method decides the number of bit planes to be encoded according to the quantization parameters to obtain the desired bit rates. So, the depth-map coding using the block-based decision of the bit-plane to be encoded proposes to free from the constraint of the quantization parameters. Simulation results show that the proposed method, in comparison with the adaptive block-based depth-map coding method, improves the average BD-rate savings by 3.5% and the average BD-PSNR gains by 0.25dB.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.6
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• pp.2271-2288
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• 2015

The emerging high efficiency video coding (HEVC) standard adopts the quadtree-structured transform unit (TU) in the residual quadtree (RQT) coding. Each TU allows to be split into four equal sub-TUs recursively. The RQT coding is performed for all the possible transform depth levels to achieve the highest coding efficiency, but it requires a very high computational complexity for HEVC encoders. In order to reduce the computational complexity requested by the RQT coding, in this paper, we propose a fast TU size decision method incorporating an adaptive maximum transform depth determination (AMTD) algorithm and a full check skipping - early termination (FCS-ET) algorithm. Because the optimal transform depth level is highly content-dependent, it is not necessary to perform the RQT coding at all transform depth levels. By the AMTD algorithm, the maximum transform depth level is determined for current treeblock to skip those transform depth levels rarely used by its spatially adjacent treeblocks. Additionally, the FCS-ET algorithm is introduced to exploit the correlations of transform depth level between four sub-CUs generated by one coding unit (CU) quadtree partitioning. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed overall algorithm significantly reduces on average 21% computational complexity while maintaining almost the same rate distortion (RD) performance as the HEVC test model reference software, HM 13.0.

• Journal of Broadcast Engineering
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• v.17 no.5
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• pp.765-780
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• 2012

In this paper, we propose a fast mode decision method that determines the coding unit depth for enhancement layers to improve an encoding speed of a scalable video encoder based on HEVC. To decide the coding unit depth of the enhancement layer, firstly, the coding unit depth of the corresponded coding unit in the basement layer is employed. At this stage, the final CU depth is decided by calculating the rate-distortion costs of one lower depth to one upper depth of the referenced depth. The proposed method can reduce a computational load since it does not calculate the rate-distortion costs for all the depths of a target CU. We found that the proposed algorithm decreases encoding complexity of 26% with approximately 1.4% bit increment, compared with the simulcast encoder of the HM 4.0.

• KSII Transactions on Internet and Information Systems (TIIS)
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• v.9 no.3
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• pp.1121-1139
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• 2015

In texture-plus-depth format, depth map compression is an important task. Different from normal texture images, depth maps have less texture information, while contain many homogeneous regions separated by sharp edges. This feature will be employed to form an efficient depth map coding scheme in this paper. Firstly, the histogram of the depth map will be analyzed to find an appropriate threshold that segments the depth map into the foreground and background regions, allowing the edge between these two kinds of regions to be obtained. Secondly, the two regions will be encoded through rate distortion optimization with a shape adaptive wavelet transform, while the edges are lossless encoded with JBIG2. Finally, a depth-updating algorithm based on the threshold and the depth range is applied to enhance the quality of the decoded depth maps. Experimental results demonstrate the effective performance on both the depth map quality and the synthesized view quality.