A Depth Image Coder Based on Progressive Silhouettes

An efficient compression of depth maps proves to be a crucial element in the transmission and storage of 3-D scenes. However, the peculiarities of geometry information make the traditional coding paradigms for natural images less effective for the coding of depth images. The letter presents a novel coding scheme that employs an oversegmentation of the input depth image into a huge set of small regions. These regions are then fused together according to the target number of objects that the algorithm needs to identify in the representation. This procedure is iterated more than once generating several refinement layers that permit obtaining a progressively-increasing quality in the scene. Experimental results show that in most cases the proposed approach reaches a better coding performance with respect to previous coding methods.