Enhancements To Mpeg4 Mvc For Depth Compression

Depth map is expected to be an essential component of upcoming 3D video formats. In a multiview scenario, along with color (texture), amount of depth information will also increase linearly with the number of views. Therefore various techniques are being explored in the research community to efficiently compress the depth data. In this paper, we propose novel methods of depth compression based on MPEG4 Multiview Video Coding standard (MVC) without any substantial increase in computational complexity. Our aim is to improve depth coding gain with minimal modification to the standard. We present experimental results which indicate a considerable coding gain when compared with MVC.