Adaptive Bit Allocation for 3D Video Coding

Abstract

In the multi-view video plus depth 3D video coding, texture image and depth map are coded jointly. The texture image is utilized for displaying and synthesizing the virtual view as reference image. The depth map provides the scene geometry information and is utilized to synthesize the virtual view at the terminal through Depth-Image Based Rendering technique. The distortion of the compressed texture image and depth map will be propagated to the synthesized virtual view. Besides the coding efficiency of texture image and depth map, bit allocation between texture image and depth map also has a great effect on the synthesized virtual view quality. Several methods are proposed for bit allocation between texture image and depth map, but most of them attempt to allocate a fixed target bitrate based on virtual view distortion model to achieve optimal synthesized virtual view quality, and the modeling process brings extra complexity. In practical application, the video sequence has different contents and fixed bit ratio cannot achieve optimal performance. In this paper, we propose an adaptive bit allocation algorithm for 3D video coding. First, we present a model to estimate the synthesized virtual view distortion, and then adjust the bit ratio between adjacent views and between texture image and depth map at Group of Picture level based on the virtual view quality fluctuation. We adjust the bit ratio to achieve the optimal virtual view quality for different video contents. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm can optimally allocate bits to achieve optimal virtual view quality under different target bitrates and for different video contents, and the computational complexity of the proposed algorithm is extremely low.