Improved depth map filtering for 3D-TV systems

Depth maps are used for rendering novel views in 3-Dimensional (3D) Television systems. When depth maps are compressed using existing codecs, the compression artifacts will cause undesirable distortions in the rendered views. This paper proposes an adaptive bilateral filtering technique to eliminate such artifacts at the receiver end. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method significantly improves the quality of rendered views up to 1.5dB, with minimal increase in complexity.