Incremental-LDI for Multi-View Coding

International audienceThis paper describes an Incremental algorithm for Layer Depth Image construction (I-LDI) from multi-view plus depth data sets. A solution to sampling artifacts is proposed, based on pixel interpolation (inpainting) restricted to isolated unknown pixels. A solution to ghosting artifacts is also proposed, based on a depth discontinuity detection, followed by a local foreground / background classification. We propose a formulation of warping equations which reduces time consumption, specifically for LDI warping. Tests on Breakdancers and Ballet MVD data sets show that extra layers in I-LDI contain only 10% of first layer pixels, compared to 50% for LDI. I-LDI Layers are also more compact, with a less spread pixel distribution, and thus easier to compress than LDI Visual rendering is of similar quality with I-LDI and LDI

Compact quad-based representation for 3D video

International audienceThe context of this study is 3D video. Starting from a sequence of multi-view video plus depth (MVD) data, the proposed quad-based representation takes into account, in a unified manner, different issues such as compactness, compression, and intermediate view synthesis. The representation is obtained into two steps. Firstly, a set of 3D quads is extracted by using a quadtree decomposition of the depth maps. Secondly, a selective elimination of the quads is performed in order to reduce inter-view redundancies and thus provide a compact representation. Experiments on two real sequences show good quality results at the rendering stage and a small data overload compared to mono-view video

Segmentation-based Method of Increasing The Depth Maps Temporal Consistency

In this paper, a modification of the graph-based depth estimation is presented. The purpose of proposed modification is to increase the quality of estimated depth maps, reduce the time of the estimation, and increase the temporal consistency of depth maps. The modification is based on the image segmentation using superpixels, therefore in the first step of the proposed modification a segmentation of previous frames is used in the currently processed frame in order to reduce the overall time of the depth estimation. In the next step, a depth map from the previous frame is used in the depth map optimization as the initial values of a depth map estimated for the current frame. It results in the better representation of silhouettes of objects in depth maps and in the reduced computational complexity of the depth estimation process. In order to evaluate the performance of the proposed modification the authors performed the experiment for a set of multiview test sequences that varied in their content and an arrangement of cameras. The results of the experiments confirmed the increase of the depth maps quality — the quality of depth maps calculated with the proposed modification is higher than for the unmodified depth estimation method, apart from the number of the performed optimization cycles. Therefore, use of the proposed modification allows to estimate a depth of the better quality with almost 40% reduction of the estimation time. Moreover, the temporal consistency, measured through the reduction of the bitrate of encoded virtual views, was also considerably increased