Region-Based Trilateral Filter For Depth Video Coding

3D video systems using depth-image-based rendering (DIBR) are attracting significant interests because of their low processing cost. In order to enable these systems, the depth video must be coded in addition to the texture video. During the coding process, coding artefacts in the depth map could cause video quality degradation of virtual view. In this paper, a region-based trilateral filter for depth video coding is proposed to improve the coding quality. First, the depth map is split into multiple objects with the label of segmentation. Then, in order to remove the artefacts from different objects and preserve the sharp edge, each pixel is filtered by using neighbouring pixels belonging to the same object. The proposed method has been evaluated with several 3D video sequences in HEVC platform. Experimental results demonstrate that the rendering quality can achieve a considerable gain under the same bitrate.