Rendering Distortion Estimation Model for 3D High Efficiency Depth Coding

A depth map represents three-dimensional (3D) scene geometry information and is used for depth image based rendering (DIBR) to synthesize arbitrary virtual views. Since the depth map is only used to synthesize virtual views and is not displayed directly, the depth map needs to be compressed in a certain way that can minimize distortions in the rendered views. In this paper, a modified distortion estimation model is proposed based on view rendering distortion instead of depth map distortion itself and can be applied to the high efficiency video coding (HEVC) rate distortion cost function process for rendering view quality optimization. Experimental results on various 3D video sequences show that the proposed algorithm provides about 31% BD-rate savings in comparison with HEVC simulcast and 1.3 dB BD-PSNR coding gain for the rendered view.