Distortions of synthesized views caused by compression of views and depth maps

The paper deals with prospective 3D video transmission systems that would use compression of both multiview video and depth maps. The paper addresses the problem of quality of views synthesized from other views transmitted together with depth information. For the state-of-the-art depth map estimation and view synthesize techniques, the paper proves that AVC/SVC-based multiview video coding technique can be used for compression of both view pictures and depth maps. The paper reports extensive experiments where synthesized video quality has been estimated by use of both PSNR index and subjective assessment. Defined is the critical value of depth quantization parameter as a function of the reference view quantization parameter. For smaller depth map quantization parameters, depth map compression has negligible influence on fidelity of synthesized views.