Object boundary-based synthesized view distortion estimation

In this paper, we propose an object boundary based view synthesis distortion estimation (VSDE) for depth map coding to improve virtual synthesized view quality. The proposed method estimates depth map distortion related to an energy minimization in such a way that additional sharp edge information of depth maps involves in VSDE. It aims at reducing visual artifacts of synthesized views along sharp edge areas while maintaining coding efficiency of depth map coding. As a result, it improves the depth coding performance slightly and reduces rendering distortions around the object boundaries. Experimental results show that the proposed method shows improved subjective visual quality while reducing coding redundancy.