Depth-based prediction mode for 3D video coding

With emerging multiview displays there is an interest in a new 3D video (3DV) representation and compression standard, which contains depth information, so that virtual views can be synthesized at the decoder from a sparse set of anchor views. With such a representation the depth map can also be utilized to increase video coding efficiency. In this work, we propose a novel depth-based prediction mode that increases inter-view prediction efficiency. The proposed mode is designed such that the syntax is simple and efficient to signal, and it is compatible with existing H.264/MVC modes. This design allows the encoder to choose between the proposed and existing prediction modes by a simple rate-distortion optimization decision. We show that depending on the depth map quality, the proposed mode can provide up to 5.5% additional bitrate savings over coding the texture video and the depth map separately. We also show that when the depth map is accurate, the proposed codec can achieve gains even over coding the texture video only, using H.264/MVC.