We present a novel depth and depth-color codec aimed at free-viewpoint 3D-TV. The proposed codec uses a shape-adaptive wavelet transform and an explicit encoding of the locations of major depth edges. Unlike the standard wavelet transform, the shape-adaptive transform generates small wavelet coefficients along depth edges, which greatly reduces the bits required to represent the data. The wavelet transform is implemented by shape-adaptive lifting, which enables fast computations and perfect reconstruction. We derive a simple extension of typical boundary extrapolation methods for lifting schemes to obtain as many vanishing moments near boundaries as away from them. We also develop a novel rate-constrained edge detection algorithm, which integrates the idea of significance bitplanes into the Canny edge detector. Together with a simple chain code, it provides an efficient way to extract and encode edges. Experimental results on synthetic and real data confirm the effectiveness of th...
Matthieu Maitre, Minh N. Do