Software and hardware design for coding depth map sequence with texture motion information

Due to the local smoothness characteristic of most real-world object surfaces, the per-pixel depth information can be efficiently compressed instead of using an additional color video channel. However, the complexity and hardware requirement are nearly two times higher than coding 2D video. By using sharing-of-motion-information method and analyzing the relationships between texture video and depth map sequence the complexity can be reduced. We propose predictive motion estimation algorithm to modify the texture motion information and mode reduction to reduce the complexity. In our algorithm, it doesn´t need any additional effort on the decoder, and the image quality can also be approximated to original H.264 at low bit-rate. At high bit-rate, our algorithm outperforms other sharing of motion information algorithm. In the hardware design, due to complexity reduction we can reduce the hardware requirement. The overall depth map sequence encoder can be smaller than original H.264 encoder. We also solve the bubble cycles problem at 8times8 PE2D processing time.