Improved reconstruction of downsampled MV-HEVC depth video

The multiview video-plus-depth format provides a promising solution for the transmission of three-dimensional video. This format can be transmitted using the multiview high efficiency video coding (MV-HEVC) standard, where the texture and the depth videos are encoded and transmitted separately. The depth maps have large homogeneous areas making their downsampling before transmission and their upsampling at the receiver an attractive option to reduce bandwidth requirements. However, this process results in distortions of the sharp edges also characteristic of depth maps, causing artefacts in the synthesized views. This work exploits the edges found in the corresponding texture view and uses a novel edge detection and depth map painting algorithm to improve the reconstruction of the edges in the upsampled depth maps. Test results show that this solution can improve the quality of depth maps by up to 2.35dB compared to other methods found in literature.