3D Video Compression Based on Extended Block Matching Algorithm

Three dimensional (3D) video is attracting a lot of attention as a new multimedia representation method. 3D video is a sequence of 3D models (frames) that consist of varying vertices and connectivity. In conventional 2D video compression algorithms, motion compensation (MC) using block matching algorithm is frequently employed to reduce redundancy between consecutive frames. However, there is no such technology for 3D video so far. Therefore, in this paper, we have developed an extended block matching algorithm (EMBA) to reduce temporal redundancy of geometry information of 3D video by extending the idea of 2D block matching to 3D space. In our EBMA, a cubic block is used as a matching unit and, MC is achieved efficiently by matching the mean normal vectors of the sub-blocks, which turned out to be sub-optimal by our experiments. The residual information is further transformed by discrete cosine transform (DCT) and then encoded. The extracted motion vectors are also entropy encoded. As a result of our experiments, compression ratio ranging from 10% to 18% of the original 3D video data has been achieved.