Depth image in-loop filter via graph cut

Liguo Zhou, Zhongyuan Wang, Youming Fu, Jun Chen, Rui Xiang, Rui Zhong, Shizheng Wang

Abstract: With the ability of representing 3D scene geometry, depth maps are used to synthesize virtual views in free view video (FVV) or 3DTV. However, compression artefact of the depth images always lead to seriously geometry distortions in synthesized view, which severely affects the visual perception of 3D display. To solve the problem caused by depth artifact, the bilateral filter based method is presented to alleviate the noise by local weighted sum of neighboring pixels. However, to overcome the unstable feature of local weight of noisy pixels, we propose a novel graph cuts algorithm for depth filter with the constraint of corresponding structure information in color image. As a depth in-loop filter, the filter is incorporated into the framework of H.264/MVC. The proposed approach offers 0.5dB and 0.8dB average PSNR gains in terms of video rendering quality and depth coding efficiency comparing with the state-of-the-art.