Depth down/up-sampling using hybrid correlation for depth coding

Abstract

In this paper, the spatial correlation and temporal consistency are jointly employed in depth down/up-sampling to achieve efficient depth coding. Given that the temporal consistency of the depth maps, a direct down-sampling method that the pixels at different positions are sampled between the adjacent frames is applied. After down-sampling, High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is adopted to encode and decode the down-sampled depth maps for its good compression efficiency. Then, the proposed up-sampling algorithm which considers the spatial correlation among the neighbor pixels in one depth map and the temporal consistency between the adjacent depth frames, as well as the correlation between the depth map and its corresponding texture image is utilized to get a good quality depth map with full resolution. Experimental results show that the proposed algorithm improves both depth map coding performance and synthesized quality.