Diffusion filtering of depth maps in stereo video coding

A method for removing irrelevant information from depth maps in Video plus Depth coding is presented. The depth map is filtered in several iterations using a diffusional approach. In each iteration smoothing is carried out in local sample neighborhoods considering the distortion introduced to a rendered view. Smoothing is only applied when the rendered view is not affected. Therefore irrelevant edges and features in the depth map can be damped while the quality of the rendered view is retained. The processed depth maps can be coded at a reduced rate compared to unaltered data. Coding experiments show gains up to 0.5 dB for the rendered view at the same bit rate.