Lost block reconstruction in depth maps using color image contours

This paper presents a method to recover lost blocks in depth maps affected by data loss in 3D image/video communications over error prone networks. The proposed method relies on the color image for accurate reconstruction of the lost contour segments in the corresponding depth map areas. Such reconstructed depth map contours are then used as boundaries at different depth planes to recover the missing depth values through weighted interpolation. The method performance is evaluated by the objective quality (PSNR) of the synthesised views. Images decoded with the reconstructed depth maps are compared with those of the reference method. The proposed method exhibits PSNR gains up to 1.49dB higher than the reference one, and a better performance is consistently achieved for different 3D image content.