Adaptive sharpening of depth maps for 3D-TV

Depth maps, which can be represented as greyscale images, are used to aid rendering of novel views in three-dimensional (3D) video systems. However, compressing them using existing video codecs, such as H.264/AVC, leads to low quality rendered views. Presented is a sharpening method based on adaptive bilateral filtering to eliminate certain artifacts observed in compressed depth maps to improve the quality of rendered views. Experimental results demonstrate that significant rendering quality improvements of up to 1.9 dB can be achieved with the proposed method.