Virtual view distortion estimation for depth map coding

Multi-view video plus depth (MVD) format is a three-dimensional (3D) video representation. The depth map in MVD provides the scene geometry information and is used to render the virtual view through Depth Image Based Rendering (DIBR). In this paper, a virtual view distortion estimation function based on the characteristics of both texture image and depth map is proposed which can estimate virtual view distortion induced by depth map compression accurately, and the function is implemented to the Rate Distortion Optimization (RDO) in the depth map coding. Compared with the View Synthesis Optimization (VSO) in 3D-HEVC Test Model (HTM) reference software, the experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method can improve the BD-PSNR of virtual view for 0.26 dB on average, and the encoding time has reduced for 31% on average due to the low complexity of the proposed function.