Evaluation of Depth-Based Super Resolution on Compressed Mixed Resolution 3D Video

Abstract

The MVC+D standard specifies coding of Multiview Video plus Depth (MVD) data for enabling advanced 3D video applications. MVC+D defines that all views are coded with H.264/MVC encoder at equal spatial resolution. To improve compression efficiency it is possible to use mixed resolution coding in which part of texture views are coded at reduced spatial resolution. In this paper we evaluate the performance of Depth-Based Super Resolution (DBSR) on compressed mixed resolution MVD data. Experimental results show that for sequences with accurate depth data the objective coding performance metric increases. Even though some sequences, with poor depth quality, show slight decrease in coding performance with respect to objective metric, subjective evaluation shows that perceived quality of DBSR method is equal to symmetric resolution case. We also show that depth re-projection consistency check step of the DBSR can be changed to simpler consistency check method. In this way the DBSR computational complexity is reduced by 26 % with 0.2 % dBR average bitrate reduction for coded views and 0.1 % average bitrate increase for synthesized views. We show that proposed scheme outperforms the anchor MVC+D coding scheme by 7.2 % of dBR on average for total coded bitrate and by 10.9 % of dBR on average for synthesized views.