Performance Analysis of HEVC Scalable Extension for Depth Maps

摘要

High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) is actually the latest video standard that enables significant compression performance improvement in comparison with its predecessors. Scalable High Efficiency Video Coding (SHVC) and 3D High-Efficiency Video Coding (3D-HEVC) are extensions of HEVC hooked on recently emerged applications and issues. 3D-HEVC targets the monolayer compression of the specific multiview plus depth 3D video representation. It consists of multiple views and their associated depth maps that are required for synthesizing intermediate views in advanced free viewpoint applications. SHVC combines the compression efficiency and visual quality of HEVC, with the possibility of encoding different versions of a same video in a single bitstream. It is conceived to cope with the heterogeneity of networks and devices used in the transmission chain of texture videos. With the ongoing progess in equipments and technologies, the scalable multilayer coding is also solicited, not to say required, for depth maps. In comparison with 3D-HEVC, this paper shows how SHVC works for quality scalable depth maps compression over different base and enhancement layers quantization scenarios. Besides, this paper analyzes the SHVC efficiency for intermediate views that are synthesized from encoded depth maps. Thus we aim to provide support for upcoming works on depth map quality scalable encoding.