Adaptive Depth edge sharpening for 3D video depth coding

In 3D video systems with Multiview Video plus Depth (MVD) representation, intermediate views can be rendered from transmitted texture views and corresponding depth maps by techniques such as Depth Image Based Rendering (DIBR). Recent standardization activities in MPEG include the development for such MVD based 3DV codecs. One codec which is H.264/AVC based is called 3DV-ATM. Because of compression, reconstructed depth maps often have certain distortions, such as blurry depth edges, which can result in noticeable artifacts in the rendered views. In this paper, a method of adaptive depth edge sharpening is proposed for 3D video coding, based on the 3DV-ATM. The proposed adaptive depth edge filtering and smoothing along depth edge techniques adaptively sharpen blurry edges of the reconstructed depth frames caused by compression. Compared to the anchor software 3DV-ATM, the proposed method achieves about 7.2% bitrate reduction on average for the rendered view PSNRs versus overall bitrates with comparable runtime complexity.