Depth Map Compression with Diffusion Modes in 3D-HEVC

For three-dimensional television, multiple views can be generated by using the Multi-view Video plus Depth (MVD) format. The depth maps of this format can be compressed efficiently by the 3D extension of High Efficiency Video Coding (3D-HEVC), which has explored the correlations between its two components, texture and associated depth map. In this paper, we introduce two modes for depth map coding into HEVC, where the modes use diffusion. The framework for inter-component prediction of Depth Modeling Modes (DMM) is utilized for the proposed modes. They detect edges from textures and then diffuse an entire block from known adjacent blocks by using Laplace equation constrained by the detected edges. The experimental results show that depth maps can be compressed more efficiently with the proposed diffusion modes, where the bit rate saving can reach 1.25 percentage of the total depth bit rate with a constant quality of synthesized views. Keywords-Depth map coding; HEVC; diffusion modes