Parameter-free view synthesis distortion model with application to depth video coding

Depth coding in 3D video is unique in that its quality is measured by the view synthesis distortion (VSD) rather than its own depth distortion, which further complicates the coding optimization as VSD is related to both the depth and texture quality. We propose a parameter-free VSD model to directly estimate the impact of depth errors on VSD on the small block basis, given its depth distortion. The proposed model is incorporated into rate-distortion optimization of depth coding, by adapting the Lagrange multiplier and optimizing the selection of quantization parameters. Simulation results show that our proposed scheme improves the BDPSNR and BDBR by 0.6dB PSNR and 20% bits saving on average compared with H.264 coding standard in depth coding, while keeping the implementation easy.