Quantization of Depth in Simulcast and Multiview Coding of Stereoscopic Video plus Depth Using HEVC, VVC and MV-HEVC

Virtual reality, free-viewpoint television, virtual navigation, 360º video are the areas of research and technology that need efficient compression of multiview video plus depth acquired by cameras with arbitrary positions. Astonishingly, proliferation of 3D extensions of AVC and HEVC technology is very low. Therefore, in this paper, we present a study on independent coding of views and depth maps. A simple technique is proposed to estimate quantization step for depth as a function of the quantization step for multiview video. This technique is studied in the context of multiview video plus depth acquired using cameras located around a scene. The approach is based on simple modeling of the relation between quantization parameters for depth and multiview video. The experimental results are obtained for stereoscopic video with two respective depth maps. For standard MPEG test sequences, the results demonstrate usefulness of the approach for HEVC, VVC, MV-HEVC codecs.