Distributed multi-hypothesis coding of depth maps using texture motion information and optical flow

Distributed Video Coding (DVC) is a video coding paradigm allowing a shift of complexity from the encoder to the decoder. Depth maps are images enabling the calculation of the distance of an object from the camera, which can be used in multiview coding in order to generate virtual views, but also in single view coding for motion detection or image segmentation. In this work, we address the problem of depth map video DVC encoding in a single-view scenario. We exploit the motion of the corresponding texture video which is highly correlated with the depth maps. In order to extract the motion information, a block-based and an optical flow-based methods are employed. Finally we fuse the proposed Side Informations using a multi-hypothesis DVC decoder, which allows us to exploit the strengths of all the proposed methods at the same time.