What is the best depth-map compression for depth image based rendering?

Abstract

Many of the latest smart phones and tablets come with integrated depth sensors, that make depth-maps freely available, thus enabling new forms of applications like rendering from different view points. However, efficient compression exploiting the characteristics of depth-maps as well as the requirements of these new applications is still an open issue. In this paper, we evaluate different depth-map compression algorithms, with a focus on tree-based methods and view projection as application. The contributions of this paper are the following: 1. extensions of existing geometric compression trees, 2. a comparison of a number of different trees, 3. a comparison of them to a state-of-the-art video coder, 4. an evaluation using ground-truth data that considers both depth-maps and predicted frames with arbitrary camera translation and rotation. Despite our best efforts, and contrary to earlier results, current video depth-map compression outperforms tree-based methods in most cases. The reason for this is likely that previous evaluations focused on low-quality, low-resolution depth maps, while high-resolution depth (as needed in the DIBR setting) has been ignored up until now. We also demonstrate that PSNR on depth-maps is not always a good measure of their utility.