Object-adaptive depth compensated inter prediction for depth video coding in 3D video system

Nowadays, the 3D video system using the MVD (multi-view video plus depth) data format is being actively studied. The system has many advantages with respect to virtual view synthesis such as an auto-stereoscopic functionality, but compression of huge input data remains a problem. Therefore, efficient 3D data compression is extremely important in the system, and problems of low temporal consistency and viewpoint correlation should be resolved for efficient depth video coding. In this paper, we propose an object-adaptive depth compensated inter prediction method to resolve the problems where object-adaptive mean-depth difference between a current block, to be coded, and a reference block are compensated during inter prediction. In addition, unique properties of depth video are exploited to reduce side information required for signaling decoder to conduct the same process. To evaluate the coding performance, we have implemented the proposed method into MVC (multiview video coding) reference software, JMVC 8.2. Experimental results have demonstrated that our proposed method is especially efficient for depth videos estimated by DERS (depth estimation reference software) discussed in the MPEG 3DV coding group. The coding gain was up to 11.34% bit-saving, and it was even increased when we evaluated it on synthesized views of virtual viewpoints.