Correlation histogram analysis of depth-enhanced 3D video coding

This paper introduces a correlation histogram method for analyzing the different components of depth-enhanced 3D video representations. Depth-enhanced 3D representations such as multi-view video plus depth consist of two components: video and depth map sequences. As depth maps represent the scene geometry, their characteristics differ from the video data. We present a comparative analysis that identifies the significant characteristics of the two components via correlation histograms. These characteristics are of special importance for compression. Modern video codecs like H.264/AVC are highly optimized to the statistical properties of natural video. Therefore the effect of compressing the two components using the MVC extension of H.264/AVC is evaluated in the second part of the analysis. The presented results show that correlation histograms are a powerful and well-suited method for analyzing the impact of processing on the characteristics of depth-enhanced 3D video.

[1]  Richard Szeliski,et al.  Stereo Matching with Transparency and Matting , 1998, Sixth International Conference on Computer Vision (IEEE Cat. No.98CH36271).

[2]  Ying Chen,et al.  The Emerging MVC Standard for 3D Video Services , 2008, EURASIP J. Adv. Signal Process..

[3]  Aljoscha Smolic,et al.  Toward a 3D video format for auto-stereoscopic displays , 2008, Optical Engineering + Applications.

[4]  Rafael C. González,et al.  Local Determination of a Moving Contrast Edge , 1985, IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence.

[5]  Thomas Wiegand,et al.  3D video: acquisition, coding, and display , 2010, IEEE Transactions on Consumer Electronics.

[6]  Aljoscha Smolic,et al.  An overview of available and emerging 3D video formats and depth enhanced stereo as efficient generic solution , 2009, 2009 Picture Coding Symposium.