Platelet-based coding of depth maps for the transmission of multiview images

Emerging 3-D displays show several views of the scene simultaneously. A direct transmission of a selection of these views is impractical, because various types of displays support a different number of views and the decoder has to interpolate the intermediate views. The transmission of multiview image information can be simplified by only transmitting the texture data for the central view and a corresponding depth map. Additional to the coding of the texture data, this technique requires the efficient coding of depth maps. Since the depth map represents the scene geometry and thereby covers the 3-D perception of the scene, sharp edges corresponding to object boundaries, should be preserved. We propose an algorithm that models depth maps using piecewise-linear functions (platelets). To adapt to varying scene detail, we employ a quadtree decomposition that divides the image into blocks of variable size, each block being approximated by one platelet. In order to preserve sharp object boundaries, the support area of each platelet is adapted to the object boundary. The subdivision of the quadtree and the selection of the platelet type are optimized such that a global rate-distortion trade-off is realized. Experimental results show that the described method can improve the resulting picture quality after compression of depth maps by 1-3 dB when compared to a JPEG-2000 encoder.