Depth Map Video Compression Performance Evaluation For Ieee 1857.9

Abstract

In 6 Degrees of Freedom (6DoF) Video, it provides 360 video considering both user's head and body movement. In IEEE 1857.9 6DoF video expression, synthesizing the virtual view in accordance with the user's movement is required. During the view synthesis process, the reference software provided by IEEE 1857.9 requires a depth map as auxiliary information. In order to reuse existing video coding standards and quickly apply them to the industry, IEEE 1857.9 provides four depth map compression interfaces for AVC, HEVC, AVS2, and AVS3(First stage HPM4.0). In addition, the depth information is never directly shown to the user. Thus, new comparison methods have to be developed that are adapted to the depth maps compression. In this paper, we investigate the depth video compression performance of the software encoders of H.264/AVC, H.265/HEVC, and AVS3 respectively. To ensure fair analysis, we evaluate the performance of the encoder by comparing the objective quality of the virtual synthetic view. We use the reference software of IEEE 1857.9 for synthesizing the virtual view. Regarding coding performance evaluation, PSNR and SSIM are used as objective quality metrics. According to the experimental results, which were obtained by using similar configurations for all examined representative encoders, the AVS3 reference software implementation provides significant average bit-rate savings of 63% and 19% compared to H.264/AVC and H.265/HEVC respectively.