Abstract
For 3-D videos, one commonly used representation method is texture videos plus depth maps for several selected viewpoints, whereas the other viewpoints are synthesized based on the available texture videos and depth maps with the depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) technique. As both the quality of the texture videos and depth maps will affect the quality of the synthesized views, bits allocation for the depth maps become indispensable. The existing bits allocation approaches are either inaccurate or requiring pre-encoding and analyzing in temporal dimension, making them unsuitable for the real-time applications. Motivated by the fact that different regions of the depth maps have different impacts on the synthesized image quality, a real-time macroblock level bits allocation approach is proposed, where different macroblocks of the depth maps are encoded with different quantization parameters and coding modes. As the bits allocation granularity is fine, the R-D performance of the proposed approach outperforms other bits allocation approaches significantly, while no additional pre-encoding delay is caused. Specifically, it can save more than 10% overall bit rate comparing with Morvan’s full search approach, while maintaining the same synthesized view quality.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Merkle, P., Smolic, A., Muller, K., Wiegand, T. (2007). Efficient prediction structures for multiview video coding. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 17(11), 1461–1473.
Vetro, A., Wiegand, T., Sullivan, G. (2011). Overview of the stereo and multiview video coding extensions of the h.264/mpeg-4 avc standard. Proceedings of the IEEE, 99(4), 626–642.
Müller, K., Merkle, P., Wiegand, T. (2011). 3-d video representation using depth maps. Proceedings of the IEEE, 99(4), 643–656.
Merkle, P., Smolic, A., Muller, K., Wiegand, T. (2007). Multi-view video plus depth representation and coding. In IEEE international conference on image processing, 2007. ICIP 2007 (Vol. 1, pp. I–201–I–204).
Oh, K.-J., Vetro, A., Ho, Y.-S. (2011). Depth coding using a boundary reconstruction filter for 3-d video systems. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 21(3), 350–359.
Zhao, Y., Zhu, C., Chen, Z., Yu, L. (2011). Depth no-synthesis-error model for view synthesis in 3-d video. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing, 20(8), 2221–2228.
Morvan, Y., Farin, D., de With, P. (2007). Depth-image compression based on an r-d optimized quadtree decomposition for the transmission of multiview images. In IEEE international conference on image processing, 2007. ICIP 2007 (Vol. 5, pp. V–105–V–108).
Kim, W.S., Ortega, A., Lai, P.L., Tian, D., Gomila, C. (2010). Depth map coding with distortion estimation of rendered view. In Proceedings of SPIE visual information processing and communication.
Oh, B.T., Lee, J., sik Park, D. (2011). Depth map coding based on synthesized view distortion function. IEEE Journal of Selected Topics in Signal Processing, 5(7), 1344–1352.
Fehn, C. (2004). Depth-image-based rendering (DIBR), compression and transmissio for a new approach on 3-D-TV. In Proc. SPIE, stereoscopic image process. Render (Vol. 5291, pp. 93–104).
Morvan, Y., Farin, D., de With, P.H.N. (2007). Joint depth/texture bit-allocation for multi-view video compression. In Picture coding symposium (PCS) (pp. 265–268).
Liu, Y., Huang, Q., Ma, S., Zhao, D., Gao, W. (2009). Joint video/depth rate allocation for 3-D video coding based on view synthesis distortion model. Signal Processing: Image Communication, 24(8), 666–681.
Yuan, H., Chang, Y., Huo, J., Yang, F., Lu, Z. (2011). Model-based joint bit allocation between texture videos and depth maps for 3-d video coding. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 21(4), 485–497.
Wang, Q., Ji, X., Dai, Q., Zhang, N. (2011). Free viewpoint video coding with rate-distortion analysis. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 22(6), 875–889.
Xiao, J., Tillo, T., Yuan, H. (2012). Real-time macroblock level bits allocation for depth maps in 3-d video coding. In W. Lin, D. Xu, A. Ho, J. Wu, Y. He, J. Cai, M. Kankanhalli, M.-T. Sun (Eds.) , Advances in multimedia information processing C PCM 2012, ser. Lecture notes in computer science (Vol. 7674, pp. 232–240). Berlin: Springer. doi:10.1007/978-3-642-34778-8_21.
Wiegand, T., Sullivan, G., Bjontegaard, G., Luthra, A. (2003). Overview of the H.264/AVC video coding standard. IEEE Transactions on Circuits and Systems for Video Technology, 13(7), 560–576.
HHI Fraunhofer Institute . H.264/AVC reference software. Available online: http://iphome.hhi.de/suehring/tml/download/.
MPEG-3-DV view synthesis reference software. Available online: http://wg11.sc29.org/svn/repos/MPEG-4/test/trunk/3D/view.synthesis..
Acknowledgments
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NO. 60972085, NO. 61210006, NO. 61201211), Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University Research Development Fund (RDF-11-01-11), Ph.D. Programs Foundation of Ministry of Education of China (No. 20120131120032), and the Excellent Youth Scientist Award Foundation of Shandong Province (No. BS2012DX021).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Xiao, J., Tillo, T., Yuan, H. et al. Macroblock Level Bits Allocation for Depth Maps in 3-D Video Coding. J Sign Process Syst 74, 127–135 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-013-0743-5
Received:
Revised:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11265-013-0743-5