Lossless depth map coding using binary tree based decomposition and context-based arithmetic coding

Depth maps are becoming increasingly important in the context of emerging video coding and processing applications. Depth images represent the scene surface and are characterized by areas of smoothly varying grey levels separated by sharp edges at the position of object boundaries. To enable high quality view rendering at the receiver side, preservation of these characteristics is important. Lossless coding enables avoiding rendering artifacts in synthesized views due to depth compression artifacts. In this paper, we propose a binary tree based lossless depth coding scheme that arranges the residual frame into integer or binary residual bitmap. High spatial correlation in depth residual frame is exploited by creating large homogeneous blocks of adaptive size, which are then coded as a unit using context based arithmetic coding. On the standard 3D video sequences, the proposed lossless depth coding has achieved compression ratio in the range of 20 to 80.