LBP-Guided Depth Image Filter

The multi-view video plus depth (MVD) format has been put forward for the call for proposals in free view video (FVV) and 3DTV. Since representing the 3D scene geometry, depth maps are used for synthesizing virtual views. However, compression artifacts of the depth images always lead to geometry distortions in synthesized views. By exploiting LBP features of the corresponding color samples, we propose a novel local binary pattern (LBP) guided depth filter which enables the local neighborhood samples those are in the same object of the current pixel to be filtering input. In recognition of its ability for describing the object edges, the LBP operator is used to calculate the weighted values of the local depth pixels for the depth-map filter. Furthermore, the filter is incorporated into the framework of H.264/MVC as an in-loop filter. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach offers 0.45dB and 0.66dB average PSNR gains in terms of video rendering quality and depth coding efficiency, as well as significant subjective improvement in rendering views.