Technique of Embedding Depth Maps into 2D Images

Abstract

This paper proposes a new technique that is used to embed depth maps into corresponding 2-dimensional (2D) images. Since a 2D image and its depth map are integrated into one type of image format, they can be treated as if they were one 2D image. Thereby, it can reduce the amount of data in 3D images by half and simplify the processes for sending them through networks because the synchronization between images for the left and right eyes becomes unnecessary. We embed depth maps in the quantized discrete cosine transform (DCT) data of 2D images. The key to this technique is whether the depth maps could be embedded into 2D images without perceivably deteriorating their quality. We try to reduce their deterioration by compressing the depth map data by using the differences from the next pixel to the left. We assume that there is only one non-zero pixel at most on one horizontal line in the DCT block because the depth map values change abruptly. We conduct an experiment to evaluate the quality of the 2D images embedded with depth maps and find that satisfactory quality could be achieved.