Influence of wavelet-based depth coding in multiview video systems

Multiview video representation based on depth data, such as multiview video-plus-depth (MVD), is emerging 3D video communication services raising in the meantime the problem of coding and transmitting depth video in addition to classical texture video. Depth video is considered as a key side information in novel view synthesis within multiview video systems, such as three-dimensional television (3 DTV) or free viewpoint television (FTV), wherein the influence of depth compression on the novel synthesized view is still a contentious issue. In this paper, we propose to discuss and investigate the impact of wavelet-based compression of the depth video on the quality of the view synthesis. Experimental results show that significant gains can be obtained by improving depth edge preservation through shorter wavelet-based filtering on depth edges.