Multiview video coding using depth based 3D warping

For future applications like 3DTV and free view point TV, the video data format is likely to comprise of multiple views plus pre-estimated geometric information such as a depth-map corresponding to each view. It has been well studied that the depth-maps are useful both from compression and rendering perspective. In this paper, we propose two methods which use the concept of depth based 3D warping for efficient multiview video compression. First, we present a method to synthesize virtual view based on 3D warping to enhance inter-view prediction. We analyze similar previous works on view synthesis based inter-view prediction and present comparative results. Next, we propose a novel method that uses 3D warping to improve conventional disparity compensated prediction. Experimental results demonstrate improved coding efficiency with our proposed methods when compared with MVC.