This paper presents a multiview-video-plus-depth coding scheme, which is compatible with the advanced video coding (H.264/AVC) standard and its multiview video coding (MVC) extension. This scheme introduces several encoding and in-loop coding tools for depth and texture video coding, such as depth-based texture motion vector prediction, depth-range-based weighted prediction, joint inter-view depth filtering, and gradual view refresh. The presented coding scheme is submitted to the 3D video coding (3DV) call for proposals (CfP) of the Moving Picture Experts Group standardization committee. When measured with commonly used objective metrics against the MVC anchor, the proposed scheme provides an average bitrate reduction of 26% and 35% for the 3DV CfP test scenarios with two and three views, respectively. The observed bitrate reduction is similar according to an analysis of the results obtained for the subjective tests on the 3DV CfP submissions.

Multi-view depth data representing the real-world 3D scenery can be inconsistent in the inter-view direction. Such inconsistency of depth data can distort the performance of the inter-view motion-compensated prediction (MCP), if the Multiview Video Coding extension of the Advanced Video Coding standard (H.264/MVC) is used for coding of multiview depth map data. In this paper we propose novel joint-view depth filtering (JVDF), which improves inter-view consistency of the multiview depth map data. Depth map images from all available views are warped to the same viewpoint, which results in multiple estimates of a real-world depth value. Estimates that belong to a confidence interval are fused together through a weighted average to produce a “noise-free” depth value estimate. In the provided simulation results the JVDF applied to 3-view depth map data significantly improves the performance of H.264/MVC coding, providing up to 13% of bitrate reduction.