Estimation of temporally-consistent depth maps from video with reduced noise

This paper presents novel results on temporally consistent depth estimation with the use of noise removal from video. Basing on the prior works, a novel, more advanced noise reduction algorithm is proposed. It uses motion compensation and additional refinement for elimination of artifacts. Also, exhaustive results, both subjective and objective, are presented for commonly known MPEG multiview test sequence set. Various means for depth maps temporal consistency measurement are tested and, among them, bitrate-based approach is identified to be the most adequate. It is shown that the proposed noise reduction technique allows for a significant improvement of temporal-consistency of the depth, which was demonstrated with 30% bitrate reduction of depth MVC coding.