Depth Map Coding Based on Arbitrarily Shaped Region

In 3D video processing systems, efficient depth map coding is vital since the quality of the synthesized virtual views highly depends on the accuracy of the depth map. In this paper, we propose an efficient depth map coding method based on arbitrarily shaped region. A depth map is first divided into some regions along the detected edges, and then the edges are coded without loss using a directional 8-connected chain code and an arithmetic codec while the pixels inside the arbitrarily shaped regions are coded by a Differential Pulse Code Modulation (DPCM) with uniform quantization. Experimental results show that our method can obtain better quality of rendered views than JPEG at the high bitrate.