Low-complexity, near-lossless coding of depth maps from kinect-like depth cameras

Abstract

Depth cameras are gaining interest rapidly in the market as depth plus RGB is being used for a variety of applications ranging from foreground/background segmentation, face tracking, activity detection, and free viewpoint video rendering. In this paper, we present a low-complexity, near-lossless codec for coding depth maps. This coding requires no buffering of video frames, is table-less, can encode or decode a frame in close to 5ms with little code optimization, and provides between 7:1 to 16:1 compression ratio for near-lossless coding of 16-bit depth maps generated by the Kinect camera.