Correlation histogram analysis of depth-enhanced 3D video coding

This paper introduces a correlation histogram method for analyzing the different components of depth-enhanced 3D video representations. Depth-enhanced 3D representations such as multi-view video plus depth consist of two components: video and depth map sequences. As depth maps represent the scene geometry, their characteristics differ from the video data. We present a comparative analysis that identifies the significant characteristics of the two components via correlation histograms. These characteristics are of special importance for compression. Modern video codecs like H.264/AVC are highly optimized to the statistical properties of natural video. Therefore the effect of compressing the two components using the MVC extension of H.264/AVC is evaluated in the second part of the analysis. The presented results show that correlation histograms are a powerful and well-suited method for analyzing the impact of processing on the characteristics of depth-enhanced 3D video.