Intra Prediction of Depth Picture with Plane Modeling

Abstract

In this paper, an intra prediction method is proposed for coding of depth pictures using plane modelling. Each pixel in the depth picture is related to the distance from a camera to an object surface, and pixels corresponding to a flat surface of an object form a relationship with the 2D plane surface. The plane surface can be represented by a simple equation in the 3D camera coordinate system in such a way that the coordinate system of depth pixels can be transformed to the camera coordinate system. This paper finds the parameters which define the plane surface closest to given depth pixels. The plane model is then used to predict the depth pixels on the plane surface. A depth prediction method is also devised for efficient intra prediction of depth pictures, using variable-size blocks. For prediction with variable-size blocks, the plane surface that occupies a large part of the picture can be predicted using a large block size. The simulation results of the proposed method show that the mean squared error is reduced by up to 96.6% for a block size of 4 × 4 pixels and reduced by up to 98% for a block size of 16 × 16, compared with the intra prediction modes of H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC.

Keywords

• depth video encoding
• intra prediction for depth picture
• plane modeling
• variable-size prediction