Rate-distortion optimal motion estimation for depth map coding

This paper presents a rate-distortion (RD) optimal motion estimation for depth coding. The view synthesis distortion is widely used in 3D video coding since it is a good approach to reduce the depth bit-rate without degradation of rendering quality. However, view synthesis distortion method is only applied to a mode decision process until now. The proposed method applies the view synthesis distortion to motion estimation process and achieves 0.41% bit-rate saving for AVC-compatible 3D video coding.