A Framework for Representation and Processing of Multi-view Video Using the Concept of Layered Depth Image

The multi-view video is a collection of multiple videos, capturing the same scene at different viewpoints. Since it contains more affluent information than a single video, it can be applied to various applications, such as 3DTV, free viewpoint TV, surveillance, sports matches, and so on. However, the data size of the multi-view video linearly increases as the number of cameras, therefore it is necessary to develop an effective framework to represent, process, and transmit those huge amounts of data. In recent, multi-view video coding is getting lots of attention as efficient video coding technologies are being developed. Although most of multi-view video coding algorithms are based on the state-of-the-art H.264/AVC video coding technology, they do not utilize rich 3-D information. In this paper, we propose a new framework using the concept of layered depth image (LDI), one of the efficient image-based rendering techniques, to efficiently represent and process multi-view video data. We describe how to represent natural multi-view video based on the LDI approach and the overall framework to process those converted data.