ROI-preserving 3D video compression method utilizing depth information

Efficiently transmitting the extra information of three dimensional (3D) video is becoming a key issue of the development of 3DTV. 2D plus depth format not only occupies the smaller bandwidth and is compatible transmission under the condition of the existing channel, but also can provide technique support for advanced 3D video compression in some extend. This paper proposes an ROI-preserving compression scheme to further improve the visual quality at a limited bit rate. According to the connection between the focus of Human Visual System (HVS) and depth information, region of interest (ROI) can be automatically selected via depth map progressing. The main improvement from common method is that a meanshift based segmentation is executed to the depth map before foreground ROI selection to keep the integrity of scene. Besides, the sensitive areas along the edges are also protected. The Spatio-temporal filtering adapting to H.264 is used to the non-ROI of both 2D video and depth map before compression. Experiments indicate that, the ROI extracted by this method is more undamaged and according with subjective feeling, and the proposed method can keep the key high-frequency information more effectively while the bit rate is reduced.